BobWP mentioning WordPress 6.4, Black Friday deals, Tumblr in the red, free vs. premium plugins and the Woo brand.

Wordfence launched a bug bounty program today to provide financial incentive for security researchers reporting high risk vulnerabilities to the company’s program.

After researchers disclose vulnerabilities to Wordfence, the company triages them and confidentially discloses them to the vendors to fix. When the fix is released, the vulnerability will be included in Wordfence’s public database, which is free to access, following a responsible disclosure policy.

“There is no cap on the rewards an individual researcher can earn, and every single in-scope vulnerability received via our submissions process earns a reward bounty,” Wordfence security analyst Chloe Chamberland said.

Wordfence will reward researchers who discover vulnerabilities in plugins and themes with 50,000+ active installations. A few examples of the payouts include the following:

“Our Bug Bounty Program has been designed to have the greatest positive impact on the security of the WordPress ecosystem,” Chamberland said. “Rewards are not earned by bulk hunting for vulnerabilities with minimal impact and earning a place on a leaderboard, but rather, they are based on active install counts, the criticality of the vulnerability, the ease of exploitation, and the prevalence of the vulnerability type.”

Wordfence’s bug bounty program launch was clearly vying for competitive positioning by indirectly calling out Patchstack, which operates its program on a leaderboard system where only the top researchers get paid. There are a few notable differences, where some bounties are awarded by discretion but most individual bounties are for the highest score in various categories:

Wordfence is taking a different approach in paying for every vulnerability reported within the scope identified by the program.

Researchers in the WordPress ecosystem should familiarize themselves with the various bug bounty programs and determine the best avenue for their disclosures. Some plugins and companies, such as Elementor, Brainstorm Force, Automattic, Castos, and WP Engine, have their own bug bounty programs, with a range of different payouts.

“We pay more per vulnerability and we pay for every valid vulnerability submitted,” Wordfence CEO Mark Maunder said. “We feel this is the only fair way to do it because gamification of a vulnerability program is like having employees who all work, but only those at the top of the leaderboard get paid. If you submit a valid vulnerability, you should get paid for your work.”

Maunder contends that the wrong incentives are driving down the quality of the research submitted.

“There are an extremely high number of low risk and low quality vulnerabilities being submitted to databases like Patchstack,” he said. “Vulnerabilities that involve a Cross-Site Request Forgery are an example of this. The incentives we are seeing out there encourage researchers to generate a a high volume of low risk vulnerabilities to get rewarded. These high numbers are then used to market security products.”

Maunder said Wordfence has structured its program around shifting the incentives to reward research into high risk vulnerabilities, instead of ramping up the marketing metrics for a particular vulnerability database.

“A high volume of low risk vulnerabilities in any particular database harms the industry because it creates work for other organizations who have to integrate this data, but for the most part it is useless noise that we are forced to sift through, rather than representing any real-world risk to the user community,” Maunder said.

As the newcomer to the group of WordPress companies offering bug bounties, Wordfence is entering the market with the intention of attracting more reports through additional bonuses (10% for the first 6 months) and a bonus structure that rewards chaining multiple vulnerabilities together, thorough documentation, and other extra efforts.

Not every author of a popular plugin or theme can afford to offer their own bug bounty program, and this is where security companies are stepping in to fill in the gaps. More competition across companies for high quality research can only be good for WordPress users, as it provides more incentive for securing the ecosystem and will potentially attract more skilled researchers. The bug bounty programs will likely evolve over time as companies refine them to provide the best value for original research.

Guests Ben Gabler from Rocket.net and Tom Fanelli from Convesio talk scaling, plugins and coding standards when it comes to performance.

WordPress contributors have worked quickly over the past 24 hours to prepare a 6.4.1 maintenance release after a critical bug emerged from a change in the Requests library, causing problems with updates on servers running older versions of cURL.

Hosting companies began reporting widespread impact of the bug. Tom Sommer, from one of Denmark’s largest hosting companies, filed a GitHub issue outlining how the cURL timeouts were affecting sites:

The issue became a top priority as it wasn’t clear how it would be possible for users to receive an update.

“Even if you fix this now the issue prevents any future auto-upgrade to a 6.4.1, since it breaks Curl requests, so the only way for people to update would be manually,” Sommer said. “The longer you wait, the bigger the problem will become.”

Nexcess reported tens of thousands of sites being affected by the bug. The issue was beyond what most users would be able to manually patch on their own, relegating hosts to figure out how to update their customers.

“All my websites locked after updating to WordPress 6.4,” Javier Martín González reported. “The ones without updates are working normally.”

Liquid Web/Nexcess product manager Tiffany Bridge summarized how this problem emerged:

WordPress core contributors will have to get to the bottom of how this bug was allowed through, via a postmortem or other discussion to prevent this from happening on such a large scale in the future.

WordPress 6.4.1 updates the Requests library from version 2.0.8 to 2.0.9. as a hotfix release to mitigate the issue. It reverts the problematic change. Version 6.4.1 also includes fixes for three other separate issues. Automatic updates shipped out this evening for anyone with sites that support automatic background updates.

WordPress’ Performance team is proposing merging Performant Translations into core in time for the upcoming WordPress 6.5 release. After an in-depth performance analysis earlier this year revealed that translations can significantly impact server response times, the team discussed various solutions and landed on one that requires no configuration from users. More than 2,000 WordPress sites have tested it through the Performant Translations feature plugin, after it was released in August.

Performance Team contributor Pascal Birchler, who penned the proposal to merge the plugin into core, explained how it speeds up sites using translations:

Birchler also published some compelling benchmarks demonstrating the plugin’s ability to reduce memory usage and decrease load time:

Locale	Scenario	Memory Usage	Load Time
en_US	Default	15 MB	159 ms
de_DE	Default	29 MB	217 ms
de_DE	Performant Translations	17 MB	166 ms

The Performance team has opened a ticket for merging the plugin into WordPress 6.5. Core committer Felix Arntz marked it as a high priority for the next release “due to the significant estimated impact this will have for localized sites’ performance.” The improvements stand to have a positive impact on the majority of WordPress sites (more than 50%) that are using translations.

WordPress 6.5 is expected in late March 2024. Getting merged this early in the release cycle would give Performant Translations the time it needs to be more widely tested and ready to go. Users who don’t want to wait until next year to get these reported performance improvements can install the plugin in the meantime.

“The Performant Translations plugin will continue to be maintained even after a core merge to build on top of the core solution with a distinct additional feature,” Birchler said. “As is already the case today, the plugin will automatically convert any MO files to PHP files if a PHP file does not currently exist. This is useful for sites where translations are not coming from translate.wordpress.org or only exist locally on that server.”

WordPress 6.4.1 is now available!

WordPress 6.4.1 is a short-cycle release. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically. If your site does not update automatically, you can also update from your Dashboard.

You can download WordPress 6.4.1 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”.

Thank you to these WordPress contributors

This release was led by Aaron Jorbin and Tonya Mork. Thank you to everyone who tested the RC and 6.4.1, and raised reports.

WordPress 6.4.1 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their quick and concerted coordination to deliver maintenance fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community.

How to contribute

To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, pick a ticket, and join the conversation in the #core channel. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

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Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how the WordPress community can stay United.

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If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox and use the form there.

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So on the podcast today, we have Marieke van de Rakt. Marieke was one of the co-founders of Yoast. She left Yoast entirely in May 2023, and is now focusing her energy on her investment company, Emilia Capital, together with Joost de Valk. This is investing in various WordPress brands and ventures.

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Marieke shares her insights on the current state of the WordPress community and the challenges it faces. She highlights the growing divide between those who prioritize community orientated contributions, and those purely driven by commercial interests. She expresses her concerns about the potential consequences if this division continues to widen, including the potential growth of other content management systems.

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This issue is certainly worthy of attention, and whilst it might seem that the two sides of this debate irreconcilable, Marieke offers potential solutions to these challenges. She emphasizes the need for the WordPress community to unite and compete against other proprietary platforms. She suggests a more cohesive marketing strategy and collaboration to strengthen the community. She advocates for an official recognition system to celebrate and promote companies actively contributing to WordPress. Although what this might look like is very much up for debate.

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We also hear about Marieke’s experiences at Yoast, and how they contributed to WordPress over the years, particularly during the development of Gutenberg. She discusses the importance of open source collaboration and the need for companies to align with the project’s direction, for the benefit of the wider community.

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We also discussed the potential negative outcomes if WordPress becomes more commercialized, leading to a divide in the community, a divide which might be difficult to undo.

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We end by chatting about the importance of WordPress in democratizing publishing, it’s benefits for the internet and the planet, and how, from Marieke’s point of view, WordPress is too important to fail.

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If you’re keen to see the WordPress community grow, and have an interest in how internal divisions can be avoided and resolved, this episode is for you.

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If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes.

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And so without further delay, I bring you Marieke van de Rakt.

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I am joined on the podcast today by Marieke van de Rakt. Hello.

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[00:04:06] Marieke van de Rakt: Hello! Very nice to be here.

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[00:04:08] Nathan Wrigley: Did I get your name vaguely right?

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[00:04:11] Marieke van de Rakt: I think you did a really good job. It sounded a bit like I’m a Viking, so a bit more Scandinavian but it was correct. Yeah.

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[00:04:20] Nathan Wrigley: I will take that. If you don’t know Marieke, honestly where have you been for the last couple of decades? Marieke was the driving force, along with her husband, of a very, very famous WordPress company, Yoast. Things have changed in the last year or so. So I wonder, for the purposes of this podcast, which is obviously a WordPress based podcast. I know it’s a bit of an uninteresting question perhaps, but for those people who don’t know who you are, could you just give us your potted history, your biography, if you like?

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[00:04:47] Marieke van de Rakt: My biography, yes of course. So I am Marieke, Marieke van de Rakt. I am, I don’t know what I am, I am an entrepreneur and an investor now. So we’ve been running Yoast since, I’ve been with the company I think since 2013, so about 10 years. And then in 2021 we sold to Newfold Digital. And then like you just said, I left Yoast I think in May of this year.

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But before leaving, we already started investing in a number of WordPress brands, so Atarim, Equalize Digital, a Dutch company called wildcloud, really, really good. Also, outside the WordPress space, we have some investments and we’re now helping those investments grow. And we’re also having some new ideas of products and things we can do in the WordPress world. So we’ll stay in the community forever.

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[00:05:37] Nathan Wrigley: Oh nice. That’s great. Do you feel like your foot has come off the pedal since May, or has your foot gone on the pedal since May? Are you busier than ever or, do you have a little bit more free time for the things that you enjoy outside of work?

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[00:05:50] Marieke van de Rakt: I do think that I have a little bit more time, but I’m also full with ideas. I have to be very careful because I wanted to work for four days a week, but I’m already working five again. But that’s all things that I like. So I think it’s better and it’s less stressful than it used to be, because I don’t have to lead a team. We do have a small team now, but it’s only three or four people, and I know them very well so they’re not difficult people. It’s easier than it used to be.

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[00:06:18] Nathan Wrigley: Well that’s good to hear. The reason that we’ve got you on the podcast today is not to talk about any of those things, but I think it was important to paint the picture of who you are and how long been in the WordPress space. Because what we’re talking about, I guess requires a fairly large telescope, staring into the history of WordPress. Because without that backstory, without that familiarity with the community over decades basically, then you wouldn’t really have the authority to write this.

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But I’m going to point listeners to this podcast to a poststatus.com post which Marieke wrote. It was on the 28th of September, so Google could be a friend here. And it was called Two Worlds of WordPress. Now just to paraphrase it, you could obviously do that, but I’ll just give it a go. Essentially, in that piece you were talking about the fact that, over the years, WordPress has grown in two seemingly contradictory directions.

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On the one hand, well you’ve called them different sides, different faces. On the one hand, you’ve got the community side. So the people who are in, as you describe it, enthusiastic about open source, contributing to the project and the events and all of that.

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And then on the other side, you’ve got the people who are business orientated, and in the back of their minds is using WordPress as a commercial vehicle, a way to generate revenue.

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Now over the course of WordPress’s history, the relationship of those two things has changed. And I feel that decades ago it was really clear that WordPress was much more community and much less business. But over the last decade or so it’s grown more and more business orientated. And your fear is that these two camps, these two faces, different sides, they’re growing apart to the point where they can’t even see what the other side is doing. There’s no point of communication between them. And in a way it’s tearing the community apart. Is that a fair summation of it?

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[00:08:08] Marieke van de Rakt: Yeah I think so. That’s what I’m afraid of. Because I think both worlds have a necessity to exist. So because the business side of WordPress grew so quickly, it also meant that there was a lot of opportunity for people to make money out of WordPress.

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So we did that all together. But it’s an open source project. So we need people to contribute to it, otherwise we’ll lose our momentum and we’ll lose the fact that we are the biggest CMS out there. So what we ideally want is that all of those businesses that make money out of WordPress also pay something back to the community. And that’s not always happening. And I know that a lot of businesses are struggling because they don’t know how and then that is hard, but that’s what I’m worried about, yeah.

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[00:08:53] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have some sort of intuition? Is there some sort of feeling that you get when you are dealing with these different sides? So as an example, when you turn up to a WordPress event and you meet somebody who is just purely in it for the contributing value of it. Do you have a different relationship with those people than you do with the people who have a only a commercial side to it? I just wonder if you’ve got any intuitions as to, do any alarm bells go off, or is there anything different about the way you deal with those different sides?

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[00:09:22] Marieke van de Rakt: Yes. I think if you meet that kind of contributor that’s only in there for the open source, that’s a hero. That’s nothing short of a hero, because he’s there for something bigger than himself. He’s there to contribute to something that is bigger. And the business side, if you’re only in it for the business side, I’m always a little bit on edge. So I think that you shouldn’t do that.

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But I also think that we should reward businesses that are giving back more. And it’s very hard to be a business that gives back and gives back and gives back, and doesn’t really get anything in return. So I know this Dutch company, we can name them, Level Level. But it’s not, especially in the Netherlands, it’s not for them immediately, that doesn’t pay them anything else except for we’re the experts.

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But perhaps if we, as the WordPress world, also shout about, but they’re the experts, they’re on every WordCamp in the Netherlands, they’re on WordCamp Europe, they come there with their entire people, all the people that work there, their team.

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Maybe those companies need a bigger shout out because they’re the ones that do contribute and, I don’t know, that could be some sort of solution. That we celebrate those people and companies that dedicate a lot of their time towards WordPress.

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[00:10:39] Nathan Wrigley: The fact that you’ve written this article, at least the implication of it is that you fear that in the future, if the current trajectory carries on, there’s going to be a moment where things break irrevocably. So the two sides grow so far apart that they genuinely have no point of reference to each other anymore.

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And really the philanthropic effort of WordPress would be lost somewhere in that. The whole project would fail. I can imagine a scenario where people, contributors who are just in it for pushing the WordPress project forward, they might have a chip on their shoulder saying, well you know, there’s all those people over there making millions of dollars for their company. I’m not making anything out of it, so I’m not going bother.

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And then the other side, well we make millions of dollars out of this project. Why would we want to waste our time contributing to it? And you just get this echo chamber. One side chatting and confirming their own confirmation bias over here, and the other side doing the exact same but in their little echo chamber.

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So is that a fear? That you think that it literally will get to the point where the project itself is broken, because there is no, in air quotes, community anymore.

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[00:11:44] Marieke van de Rakt: I think then other CMSs will grow, because of our division between those two worlds, will make a smaller and other CMSs will grow. Because, well, we care about open source, a lot of people don’t, and they don’t choose WordPress just because it’s open source. They choose WordPress because it used to be the best. I don’t know if it’s the best anymore but it used to be the best. So if we look at marketing, all these big companies, so the big hosts, all market their own brand. So GoDaddy markets for GoDaddy. Bluehost markets for Bluehost. SiteGround markets for SiteGround.

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But they all do WordPress. So perhaps we should also market WordPress as a system more, we don’t do that. They’re competing with each other, and they’re competing with companies like Wix and Shopify. But I think as a whole of the WordPress community we should be competing with each other against Shopify and Wix. And we don’t do that enough. We should join forces more. Also on the business side of things.

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[00:12:45] Nathan Wrigley: I think that’s really interesting because, I think only people who are deeply into WordPress in the same way that you and I both are, you know, we probably think about WordPress more than is healthy for us.

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But we’re really obsessed by it, so we go out searching for the news and we look for the companies that are, in air quotes, doing the right thing. Until we read the posts that come out on an annual basis saying who has contributed, which companies have contributed and so on. But most people using WordPress probably won’t have any idea about that because it’s not really applauded publicly, is it?

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I think we should probably call out Yoast at the moment and discuss what you decided to do, because that was a really good example. So we’re recording this in October 2023, obviously caveat emptor, I don’t know what will happen in the future in terms of WordPress’s contribution. But what was your stated goal? How did you want to commit time within the company, resources within the company? Because obviously that would be a model that you think worked quite well.

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[00:13:44] Marieke van de Rakt: We have the Five for the Future working quite well. At Yoast we did that before that even was a thing. But I remember, and this was WordCamp Europe, the first one in 2013, yes it was in 2013 in Leiden. And Yoast did a talk and I prepared that talk. It was about open source and about how it’s okay to make money out of it.

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And that was this huge thing. People were, no you’re not allowed to make money out of. We were allowed to make money out of themes, because they were all unique and you wanted to be unique. But on plugins, everybody needed a plugin, it was frowned upon. But we, or Yoast back then, had I think 2,000,000 installs, and you get so many questions off people. You can’t maintain a plugin and make sure it’s secure, and come up with new features and test that, that’s impossible to do without making money.

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So we started out, I think we were the first to start out with a freemium model thing, and that was frowned upon for a few years. And then everybody started doing that, and they went much further than we did. So we first were very reluctant to go to that you buy something and that’s an immediately you buy it for a couple of years, unless you actively say no I don’t want it anymore, you have to call out. We just gave you for one year and then you have to manually renew because we didn’t want anybody to feel like, oh no I’m stuck to it.

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This all changed but we were reluctant in that kind of way. And we saw that we were just. So we weren’t perhaps the first most commercial, but then so many companies came in, mostly outside of the WordPress world who did it differently.

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And at the end when we sold Yoast I felt really naive because I got a little peek of what it’s like to be on the really business side after we sold Yoast. We didn’t know, we didn’t know that there were all kinds of meetings and people making deals about who installs what, and we didn’t do that at Yoast, we just built the best product and contributed a lot to WordPress. Part because we believed in it, but also part because it just makes sense.

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When Gutenberg was announced, that was a major implication for the Yoast plugin. We had to be involved otherwise it would have been really bad for our product. So that’s something. Even if you’re not like a WordPress enthusiastic like we are, just because it will allow you to see where the project is going, that’s a good reason to contribute, that alone. So it also makes business sense to do that.

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[00:16:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah so, what specifically was the sort of, the things that you did in Yoast? What were the boots that you put on the ground, the hours that you allocated? Now it may be that it was a movable feast and that each year was different, but broadly speaking, typically, what was the kind of commitment that you were prepared to make? That could be in terms of hours, finance, whatever, however you want to take it.

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[00:16:41] Marieke van de Rakt: So I think Joost personally did a day a week for ages. And we had entire teams, community teams that did nothing else than sponsoring WordCamps, organising WordCamps, those kinds of stuff. And then we had a few during Gutenberg, we had, I think two full time developers on it.

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And afterwards we, Yoast still has, a core contributor team. So there were like four or five contributors that worked solely on the project. I think Yoast did a little over 5% in terms of hours and money, but not even that much. In the beginning it was, I think in the beginning we did 20% but when we grew bigger, I think 5% to 10%, you can do a lot with 5% to 10% of a bigger company.

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[00:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: First of all, the reason you’re doing all of this, my guess is it wasn’t to be recognised publicly. That would be nice, but that wasn’t the primary motive. It was to foster a good relationship with the community to promote the whole project itself.

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But there must be some side of that equation where you’re thinking, we’re putting all this time in, there seems to be a lot of companies out in the space who are probably more profitable than us, who are not putting an equal amount of time in, and we don’t seem to be getting much in the way of recognition.

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So really what I’m asking is, did you feel that the recognition piece was something that was lacking? Maybe something that ought to be considered in the future, some sort of an an official badge, some way of displaying, look this company did this categorically, we’re very proud of them. Let’s just talk about recognition.

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[00:18:17] Marieke van de Rakt: Within the core of the WordPress community we were recognised, people saw that. So that’s good. But outside of that first bubble people have no idea. And then a WordPress stamp of approval, and I don’t know how you should come up with some things. Oh also a company like Level Level who does a lot, if they get a WordPress stamp of approval that would help them so much with selling websites because they build websites.

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If we would have a WordPress stamp of approval, not even this is the best SEO plugin for Yoast, but this is they contribute to WordPress, they have their things in order, that would help a lot.

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But we don’t have something like that, and I don’t know how to set something like that up. But I do think that would help. Because we really believed in the open source thought. So not even I like WordPress, but the fact that you can build something together, and you don’t have to come up with an, event the wheel over and over again, that just makes sense for whole world.

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So I’m a strong believer in open source and in working together without having all these, I don’t know, without talking about, this is mine and you shouldn’t have this. That’s just a bad way of running the world. So I think that’s something we strongly believe in.

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[00:19:34] Nathan Wrigley: I think having some sort of accreditation system, the merits of that would be good, but I can equally see how the actual organisation of that would be fraught with problems. Because no doubt there’d be companies who, I don’t know, just didn’t quite get out of that accreditation what they were hoping for, and yet they’d clearly put in some time. And so you’d have to have bodies on the ground making sure that accreditation was fair and meritorious and everybody got what they deserved.

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So that does seem like a bit of a minefield to go down. But then the project prioritizes all sorts of things that don’t have a profit motive, and maybe something like that, an accreditation system could be something worthwhile.

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It just occurs to me that if I go around WordPress company websites, you don’t see that, do you? You don’t see them shouting on the hero section of their web page, we have contributed such and such an amount of hours. It’s all about the product that they’ve got because they’re selling directly to end, you know, end users.

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[00:20:33] Marieke van de Rakt: And they don’t understand that. But I think as a community, we should make people more aware. It’s like buying or working with open source software is like being a vegetarian, you’re just doing the right thing. So we should talk about that more, because it’s the only way I think we can move forward, and come up with new knowledge, everybody should do open source.

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So every government website should be made out of open source software. It can be really, get mad if they spend money on proprietary systems. They should spend money on, I don’t know, health and education and don’t spend it on a very expensive software, because there’s software that’s really good and we should use that. But I think as a community, perhaps we should talk more about why open source is so awesome.

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[00:21:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah it really is tricky, but I have this intuition that something like this would be a good idea, despite the fact that it would be almost impossible I think to manage, and it would be very difficult to decide who got what.

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But in your conversations over the years working at Yoast, okay let’s imagine that there’s somebody listening to this podcast who desperately wants to contribute, but feels that they don’t have the bandwidth to do that. They’re not profitable enough, they don’t have enough hours to make that possible. So this question is directed to you but talking to them, if you know what I mean.

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So when you were working at Yoast, did you get an impression that your contributions to the project led to you being profitable? Were there certain customers of yours who came to you because you were working so hard for the project as a whole, and not just because you had a superior product?

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[00:22:12] Marieke van de Rakt: Not directly, but I’m convinced that indirectly, yes. So being on all those events, having Taco, having Taco just being everywhere and organising, and talking to people helps with getting those core community people talking about you. And when they talk about you to all the other people, it just, it’s like a pyramid that goes down.

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So we never did any influencer marketing, we did WordPress contribution. And I think it’s about the same thing, because you just show up at contributor days or at events and you talk to people. And when you do those kinds of things, you also talk about your product and people think you are nice because you’re helping. Not everybody thinks you’re nice, so you always have that.

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But I think that’s just WordPress influencer marketing. I even say that to people we invest in. I said, you should do WordPress influencer marketing. That means contributing to the project and doing your best. And that’s the way the people in the community will get to know you and see you, and they’ll also talk about your product then.

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[00:23:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s no direct correlation between the amount that you put in and the success, if you like, of the commercial side at least of the plugin. But there is some sort of fuzzy appreciation on your behalf, that there is a connection even though you can’t quite grab hold of what that is.

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But the more that you put in, the more recognition you’ve got, the more the brand became known and probably the by product of that is that there would be sales from that. I should point out that Marieke isn’t just doing this one piece, we’ve talked about this two worlds of WordPress piece. It’s going to be a regular feature on Post Status.

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[00:23:54] Marieke van de Rakt: Yeah. So I’m just telling stories from both worlds and sometimes, well no, there’s always one side, sometimes two, that I think, I hope, that’ll help to get those worlds to understand each other. That’s the only thing I hope.

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[00:24:10] Nathan Wrigley: The broad overarching idea behind all of the posts that you’re going to be putting on Post Status is about getting the commercial side and the non commercial side, to get them talking a bit more. And to get, because obviously, Post Status has this enormous reach and that would be a really superb place to do it.

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One of the pieces that you wrote was called, On people breaking up with WordPress. And I’m sure I don’t need to explain to everybody what that means, but you can guess. It was all about how people decide that they want to move away from the project.

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But one of the things that you wrote in there, I’m curious as to how this fits with everything that you’ve just been talking about. You wrote, and I’m going to quote, I strongly believe that all contributors, so developers, marketers, organisers, et cetera, to the WordPress project, need to be financially compensated. Next to that, I think it would help if they feel valued and important, and that they’ll be able to be productive.

\n\n\n\n

Let’s talk about the first bit, the financial compensation, because I don’t think anybody would disagree with that, would they? Everybody would love to think that, you know, you contribute something to WordPress, you’ve got something, you get return, you put an hour in, you get some finance back.

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How do you see that working in reality? Especially if you’re, I don’t know, you’re working for a plugin company, let’s say, and there’s not a lot of money sloshing around, you’ve got very little reserves. How would you like to see this happen? Are you talking about like a pool that big companies who are successful put money into, and then if you like that can be dipped into by people from around the community. What were you thinking there?

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[00:25:44] Marieke van de Rakt: That would be best. I think the most money in the WordPress world is made by hosting companies. So they have large margins. If they don’t want to hire people themselves then they should invest in people that want to contribute their time. And I think in the beginning of WordPress it was led by volunteers, but I do think that nowadays there is so much money being made that we should be able, together with all of us, to at least compensate for those hours that put in.

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And that’s probably not the highest salary but people should be compensated a little. And I know still that there are main organisers for WordCamps that do that entirely in their free time. And I think that’s just wrong. There’s too much money being made by big companies, and they should pitch in together to make sure that the events are led by people that are also paid for their contributions.

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[00:26:43] Nathan Wrigley: That seems like a really credible way of short circuiting the accreditation thing that we were talking about earlier. We can prove categorically that we committed 5 percent of something. Whether that’s 5 percent of time across our employee distribution. Or whether that’s 5 percent of the finance that we had available to us in this year.

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And we’re talking about this 5 percent because, I don’t know if you know dear listener, there is this concept of Five for the Future where exactly this would happen. But there’s no way of demonstrating to the world that you did it.

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So just that simple metric of, we did and we’ve certified that we did Five for the Future, maybe that alone would be a fairly, it’s a fairly blunt instrument, but at least it would be some way of the company’s getting that recognition back. The badge could go on the website, so that people who are into the community could fully understand, okay, there it is. They did their 5 percent contribution for whatever it was. That might be a fairly swift and easy way, well not easy, but a fairly quick way of doing it.

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[00:27:44] Marieke van de Rakt: It could also be a way of getting those worlds together. I think that’s the start. I just think there’s too much money being made by big companies to have people volunteer and have a hard time. If you’re an organiser of a big WordCamp, which is like WordCamp Europe is extremely important that it exists for businesses. Those businesses should also be like, I have to make sure that this continues.

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And that means that those people need to be compensated because they are usually working for themselves. But if you build websites and you organise an event, you probably build less websites if you’re like busy organising WordCamp Europe. I think the WordPress world has been, we used to do it with all volunteers and I don’t think that we can do this anymore.

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[00:28:30] Nathan Wrigley: When an event like WordCamp Europe is put on, the level of commitment from some, again it could be any WordCamp, but I just pluck WordCamp Europe out of thin air. Because, well it’s so big and because of that there’s so many technicalities. And having interviewed quite a few of the people who were really involved in those projects, they are genuinely giving up weeks and weeks of their year. And they’re doing it out of the goodness of their heart.

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Now in some cases it may be that they’ve got some kind of sponsorship somewhere, maybe their company has allowed them to have that time. But I have a strong intuition that many of them are literally taking it almost like annual leave.

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And so it’s exactly what you said. It’s not just that they’re committing time, but they are committing time which they can’t get back in their own business. So it’s a double whammy. They’re not getting paid for that contribution, but also they’re losing money so it’s going wrong in both directions.

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I don’t know how that would work, but it does strike me that badge, that 5 percent commitment being pulled somewhere, some independent organisation which could then give that out seems like a good idea.

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If we’re going to accredit people, now this could be controversial, if we’re going to credit people, do we go the other way? Do we go in the direction of calling out companies that don’t do it? Is that something which the community should ever be involved in? My intuition says no, but that’s just my intuition, what do you think?

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[00:29:54] Marieke van de Rakt: My intuition also says no, because it’s a very negative thing to do. And it’s hard as well because, especially like in the plugin businesses you know, but in the website builder businesses, a lot of websites builders will not even know about Five for the Future or anything like that. I wouldn’t call people out on not contributing but perhaps other people will.

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[00:30:17] Nathan Wrigley: I’m sure they will, because people who are not bound to any particular company, they might have stronger feelings about that and they can do that in their own way, can’t they? So really we’re painting a picture of, if you do the right thing there should be a mechanism for you to be able to certify that you have done the right thing, and have some sort of badge of honor to be able to display that and explain.

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What are your feelings about how you feel this conversation is going to be received? Because we’re having this, we’ve had a little bit of a chat beforehand, and we exchanged a few messages and so on and so we knew what we were talking about. But somebody listening to this for the first time, it may be difficult to hear this conversation because it’s a, you know, it’s the trusted community, it’s the thing that we love and here we are suggesting that potentially money has to be involved. What would you say to those people who don’t want money to have anything to do with their WordPress experience?

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[00:31:08] Marieke van de Rakt: I love those people just because I think their heart is in the right place. But I also feel like it’s not fair to those people because there’s so much money being made by those big companies, so everybody should be compensated or should grow from that.

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I just think, I know I’ve had conversations in the past in which people said it should be true volunteers, and not even compensated by the company you work for, it should only be volunteers. I think it’s just not fair to those people, that they’re doing the big chunk of work. Especially if it’s organising, like a day volunteering is different to me than organising an event out of your free time.

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You’re organising something that’s of massive importance to those big companies, because they see each other there and they set up deals together, business deals. So they really need that event. They need the organisers to be in space. Those people just deserve to be compensated.

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I love everybody who says that they want to do it for free, but I also think that’s not fair to them, and to their work. It’s not playing around anymore, these are like really big events. The first WordCamp Europe was 650 people, but we’re now talking about 3,000, I don’t know, 4,000 people. That’s a different league. We’re playing in a different league now.

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[00:32:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I guess the rules of engagement change, don’t they? If you’ve ever been to a non WordPress event, so a more commercial event, you might have sympathy from what I’m about to say. They really do feel different, just the whole purpose of standing in that space is the economics of it. You are there to pitch your product, and that is the bottom line.

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And if you haven’t been to a WordPress event, firstly, can I encourage you to go because you’ll probably make some great friends as much as anything else. But you don’t get that feeling, you get the feeling that it still has that community vibe to it. There are still oodles of people milling about who aren’t on the commercial side.

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But I wonder, with the people who are just in it for the commercial side, have they already gone too far? What is the road back, if you like, I’m going to say it that way. What’s the road back for these people? Where would you encourage them to go? Who would you encourage them to talk to? Which projects would you point them in the direction of?

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If somebody listening to this, their spidey sense has gone, oh hang on a minute what Marieke is saying makes sense. We’re on the commercial side, we don’t really have much in the way of the community side. How can we begin that journey? Where would you go? Where would you point them?

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[00:33:43] Marieke van de Rakt: That’s hard, because I know there are companies that want to do something and don’t know. So perhaps that’s something we should be setting up, that people who are now contributing but are not being compensated for the hours, that they can somewhere say, hello. And then companies that want to compensate somebody, or sponsor somebody, can find each other. I don’t know if there’s something like that. Michelle Frechette should put up a website about that.

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[00:34:07] Nathan Wrigley: We do have something called the WPCC, which might cover a little bit of this ground. It’s the WP Community Collective, and I will put that in the show notes. They have the opportunity for you to contribute financially to projects that have been decided upon already.

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As an example, I can’t remember what they call them, bursaries or something like that. You contribute to that and then if the goal is reached then that particular bit, it might be accessibility or it might be something else, that bit will happen.

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But it’s not quite the, it’s not really the place, essentially what you’re doing there is contributing your finance, which is great but it’s not really getting you inside of the community, is it? So I don’t know if such a thing exists.

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[00:34:48] Marieke van de Rakt: Come to a WordCamp, come to a contributor day, that’ll help. I think then you’ll at least see, I didn’t understand anything on my first contributer day, but I know now the onboarding is better than when I started. And talk to people and see what you can do.

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And I think if you’re profitable. Financial, there’s a lot to help. So that’s a very good first start, and perhaps then you work with someone and can see what you could do too yourself.

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I’m always reluctant to be an organiser because I’m afraid that I’ll get in fights with everybody. It’s just true. I just want certain things a certain way, so I’m not going to do that. But I now know that my colleague, which works with our new company, she said, I would like to do that. So now I’m like, oh that’s great, we’ll sponsor your time and you can do that. And nobody ever gets mad at her because she’s really sweet.

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[00:35:41] Nathan Wrigley: There is an option that none of this happens, and the whole thing goes pear shaped. That the enterprise of WordPress becomes more and more commercial, we just sort of put up with it, and eventually the community does just reach this point where the two sides can’t talk to each other, and so therefore, really the whole enterprise has fizzled out and gone away.

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That feels like a real shame. It does feel like the promise of something like WordPress, to democratise publishing. I know it’s easy to say those words, but the fact that you and I both have, no matter how much money is in our pocket, we have the capacity to go somewhere, and so long as we’ve got access to the internet, we can download that software and we can publish whatever we like, whenever we like, to whomever we like.

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It’s too precious of a thing to allow to just disappear, because we can’t be bothered to figure out solutions like this. That would such a shame if that happened.

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[00:36:37] Marieke van de Rakt: Yeah I think we agree here. I also think that would be bad for the planet. So it would be bad for the community. But I also believe that the world is better if WordPress is bigger, because of the fact that a lot of people are in there to make the best software, and to build accessible software and to make sure that it’s, I don’t know, it’s really democratising publishing. So it would be a bad thing for the internet if WordPress would not flourish.

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[00:37:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think we can see all over the internet examples where proprietary, privately owned platforms, the incentives for those platforms to exist, it doesn’t take too many years for all sorts of bad incentives to creep in, and all of a sudden you notice that you’re being advertised all sorts of things, and your feed is being filled up with all sorts of things that potentially are good for the company behind that, but not necessarily great for you.

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That really isn’t the internet that probably anybody realistically wants. It might be free and it might be on a gigantic global scale, but maybe it’s not in everybody’s best interest. So let’s hope that we don’t have the calamity that we have just described. I have this feeling that in some way we will figure out these wrinkles, but I share your concern that now is probably the time to tackle them and not let this problem get too far.

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Before we hit record, we talked about this and we said that, really, we’re not in the game today of offering up any answers. We were just in the business of airing it, and stirring up this debate and seeing what came out.

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[00:38:11] Marieke van de Rakt: Other people can come up with the answers.

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[00:38:14] Nathan Wrigley: But that’s important. It’s true, isn’t it? Neither you nor I have the perfect solution. We’ve come up with a few things on the fly here today. But it would be good if anybody who had any intuitions around this, who had some novel idea that maybe nobody else has had before. Maybe you’ve tried something out in your company that you thought worked and would spread more globally. If somebody wanted to contact you, Marieke, where these days is the best place to keep this conversation going?

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[00:38:42] Marieke van de Rakt: I’m on Twitter but it’s not called, no it’s called X now. I think that’s the best way get in touch. I’m not very active on Twitter but I do read it. So if you send me something there i’ll read it.

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[00:38:54] Nathan Wrigley: And the fact you’re writing these posts every week, this is something which is dear to your heart. This isn’t a flash in the pan thing for you. You’re going to keep banging this drum in the days, weeks and months to come, right?

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[00:39:04] Marieke van de Rakt: Yeah, I’m going to be talking about these kinds of issues and I hope that that’ll get the conversation started. People thinking about it, that would be good. And then we have a lot of new events coming up, I think, and then we’ll figure it out. I know there are a lot of people working on the same things, trying to solve the same problems.

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I also think WordPress is too big to fall apart all of a sudden. So we’ll figure it out. I’m also hopeful, I’m an optimist.

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[00:39:34] Nathan Wrigley: Marieke van de Rakt, thank you so much for chatting to me on the podcast today. I appreciate it.

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[00:39:40] Marieke van de Rakt: Thank you. I had a good time.

Marieke was one of the co-founders of Yoast. She left Yoast entirely in May 2023 and is now focussing her energy on her investment company Emilia Capital (together with Joost de Valk). This is investing in various WordPress brands and ventures.

Marieke shares her insights on the current state of the WordPress community and the challenges it faces. She highlights the growing divide between those who prioritise community-oriented contributions and those driven purely by commercial interests. She expresses her concerns about the potential consequences if this division continues to widen, including the potential growth of other content management systems.

This issue is certainly worthy of attention, and whilst it might seem that the two sides of this debate are irreconcilable, Marieke offers potential solutions to these challenges. She emphasises the need for the WordPress community to unite and compete against other proprietary platforms. She suggests a more cohesive marketing strategy and collaboration to strengthen the community. She advocates for an official recognition system to celebrate and promote companies actively contributing to WordPress, although what that might look like is very much up for debate.

We also hear about Marieke’s experiences at Yoast and how they contributed to WordPress over the years, particularly during the development of Gutenberg. She discusses the importance of open-source collaboration and the need for companies to align with the project’s direction for the benefit of the wider community.

We also discuss the potential negative outcomes if WordPress becomes more commercialised, leading to a divide in the community, a divide which might be difficult to undo.

We end by chatting about the importance of WordPress in democratising publishing, its benefits for the internet and the planet, and how, from Marieke’s point of view, WordPress is too important to fail.

If you’re keen to see the WordPress community grow, and have an interest in how internal divisions can be avoided and resolved, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Join our new hosts Emma Young and Adam Weeks for a great conversation and insights into doing sales on Black Friday.

WordPress 6.4 “Shirley” was released today, named for famed American jazz pianist and singer Shirley Horn. This release introduces a new batch of writing and design tools that give users more powerful customization capabilities inside the editor. We covered most of the changes as they were released in the Gutenberg plugin and added to core, but here are a few of the highlights.

Lightbox

WordPress now has core support for loading images in a lightbox. It’s a simple, yet elegant “expand on click” feature that allows visitors to expand images to be full-screen without leaving the page. The lightbox can be enabled on a per-image basis or site-wide under Styles » Blocks » Images.

Redesigned Command Palette

The Command Palette has gotten a design refresh in 6.4 in order to accommodate a growing catalog of commands available to help users perform tasks more efficiently. Users can access the tool inside the Site Editor and the Post Editor alike, with specific contextual command options for saving time across both editing experiences.

List View Improvements

The List View continues to get improvements to make it more useful for getting a condensed overview of the content at a glance. WordPress 6.4 adds media previews for the Gallery and Image blocks in the List View. It also allows users to assign custom names for Group blocks, which are visible in the List View so they can be easily organized.

Block Hooks

Block Hooks are a new developer feature, originally introduced in Gutenberg 16.4 for auto-inserting blocks. Developers can specify a location where a block will be inserted, such as before or after a template. Users can then reposition the blocks after insertion using the editor tools.

Twenty Twenty-Four

WordPress 6.4 ships with a brand new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Four. It was designed to be a multi-purpose theme, suitable for building a wide range of websites, including blogs, businesses, and portfolios. The theme comes with more than 35 templates and patterns. Check out a live demo to see all the full-page patterns, section patterns, and style variations available in Twenty Twenty-Four. It includes three different fully-built site demos for blogger, photographer, and entrepreneur use cases.

Check out the beautiful 6.4 release page to see all the major features highlighted. Under the hood there are also more than 100 performance-related updates and a range of accessibility improvements that create a more consistent experience in the site and post editors.

This is the last major release planned for 2023. It includes contributions from more than 600 people across 56 countries, with 170 first-time contributors.

WordPress 6.4 was led by an underrepresented gender release squad, which Release Lead Josepha Haden Chomphosy organized “to welcome and empower diverse voices in the WordPress open source project.” Together they shipped 1,150 enhancements and fixes available now in 6.4.

Jetpack 12.8 was released this week, introducing Jetpack Creator, a new product under the Growth category that sits alongside the recently launched Newsletter product. Jetpack Creator is aimed at users who want to monetize their content and subscribers. It supports e-books, courses, paid newsletters, advertising, paywalled access, and other content monetization options.

The market size of the creator economy is growing and established social networking apps are updating their offerings to better serve creators who are marketing themselves independently. According to Goldman Sachs Research, the creator economy could approach half-a-trillion dollars by 2027:

Jetpack Creator bundles monetization features aimed at this market. It enables access to 40+ blocks that allow creators to paywall content, add subscriber forms, accept donations, start a newsletter, and receive payment via Stripe or PayPal. Jetpack Creator also extends existing products, like adding the ability to import unlimited subscribers. The free Newsletter product caps subscriber imports at 100.

Users on the Creator plan are also added to Jetpack’s “creator network,” which appears to be similar to ConvertKit’s creator network with a few differences. The network is designed to amplify creator’s content to help them reach a broader audience across WordPress.com and self-hosted sites using Jetpack. Jetpack’s creator network aims to get sites exposure to new readers through distribution to more areas of WordPress.com’s Reader.

It also includes author recommendations, powered by the Blogroll block, which was introduced in Jetpack 12.7. Site admins can recommend other sites their readers might enjoy and have their site included in others’ recommendations as well.

The Suggested follows modal is currently driven by an algorithm and suggests additional publications to follow based on what other people follow and other publications recommend. Jetpack representatives said there are plans to make it more Blogroll driven in the future.

Creators can track their engagement through a number of different ways in Jetpack, including general traffic stats, email open stats, WordAds revenue, and subscriber stats, with a new growth chart using records going forwards since October 24. Jetpack also includes an Earn screen for those selling paid content.

The Jetpack Free plan gives users access to all the monetization tools for free but takes 10% of all revenue, similar to Substack and Gumroad. This allows users to try out the tools to see if they can make money through their web presence. The new Creator plan reduces the fees to 2% (plus Stripe fees), a significant savings for those who are successfully earning money as an online creator.

Jetpack product manager Mike Stott said his team is keen on receiving feedback on this initial offering and will continue developing the roadmap based on users’ input.

“There’s a lot happening in Newsletter – last month we launched Paid Newsletter tiers and we’ll be bringing subscriber modal and categories settings into the Jetpack UI in future too,” Stott said.

“We’ll also be making it easier for content creators to gain more subscribers through the creator network (a start to this is the Author recommendations) as well as make it easier to get started.”

Say hello to WordPress 6.4 “Shirley,” named after the iconic jazz artist Shirley Horn. Her distinctive voice and extraordinary connection to the piano established her as one of the leading jazz musicians of her generation. Horn’s journey from the Washington D.C. jazz scene to the international stage is a testament to her dedication and perseverance. Her influence reached far beyond the confines of traditional jazz, breaking boundaries and inspiring audiences worldwide.

This latest version of WordPress introduces a new, versatile default theme and a suite of upgrades to empower every step of your creative journey. Craft your content seamlessly with further writing improvements. Explore more ways to bring your vision to life and streamline site editing with enhanced tools. Whether you’re new to WordPress or an experienced creator, “Shirley” has something for you. Discover the unmatched flexibility of building with blocks and let your ideas take flight.

What’s inside 6.4

Meet Twenty Twenty-Four

Experience site editing at its finest with Twenty Twenty-Four. This new multi-faceted default theme has been thoughtfully crafted with three distinct use cases in mind, from writers and artists to entrepreneurs. Save time and effort with its extensive collection of over 35 templates and patterns—and unlock a world of creative possibilities with a few tweaks. Twenty Twenty-Four’s remarkable flexibility ensures an ideal fit for almost any type of site. Check it out in this demo.

Let your writing flow

New enhancements ensure your content creation journey is smooth. Find new keyboard shortcuts in List View, smarter list merging, and enhanced control over link settings. A cohesive toolbar experience for the Navigation, List, and Quote blocks lets you work efficiently with the tooling options you need.

The Command Palette just got better

First introduced in WordPress 6.3, the Command Palette is a powerful tool to quickly find what you need, perform tasks efficiently, and speed up your building workflow. Enjoy a refreshed design and new commands to perform block-specific actions in this release.

Categorize and filter patterns

Patterns are an excellent way to leverage the potential of blocks and simplify your site-building process. WordPress 6.4 allows you to organize them with custom categories. Plus, new advanced filtering in the Patterns section of the inserter makes finding all your patterns more intuitive.

Get creative with more design tools

Build beautiful and functional layouts with an expanded set of design tools. Play with background images in Group blocks for unique designs and maintain image dimensions consistent with placeholder aspect ratios. Do you want to add buttons to your Navigation block? Now you can do it conveniently without a line of code.

Make your images stand out

Enable lightbox functionality to let your site visitors enjoy full-screen, interactive images on click. Apply it globally or to specific images to customize the viewing experience.

Rename Group blocks

Set custom names for Group blocks to organize and distinguish areas of your content easily. These names will be visible in List View.

Preview images in List View

New previews for Gallery and Image blocks in List View let you visualize and locate where images on your content are at a glance.

Share patterns across sites

Need to use your custom patterns on another site? Import and export them as JSON files from the Site Editor’s patterns view.

Introducing Block Hooks

Block Hooks enables developers to automatically insert dynamic blocks at specific content locations, enriching the extensibility of block themes through plugins. While considered a developer tool, this feature is geared to respect your preferences and gives you complete control to add, dismiss, and customize auto-inserted blocks to your needs.

Performance wins

Accessibility highlights

Every release is committed to making WordPress accessible to everyone. WordPress 6.4 brings several List View improvements and aria-label support for the Navigation block, among other highlights. The admin user interface includes enhancements to button placements, “Add New” menu items context, and Site Health spoken messages. Learn more about all the updates aimed at improving accessibility.

Other notes of interest

Learn more about WordPress 6.4

Check out the new WordPress 6.4 page to learn more about the numerous enhancements and features of this release.

Explore Learn WordPress for quick how-to videos, online workshops, and other free resources to level up your WordPress knowledge and skills.

If you are looking for detailed technical notes on new changes, the WordPress 6.4 Field Guide is for you. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Developer Blog to stay on top of the latest development updates, tutorials, and more.

For more information on installation, fixes, and file changes, visit the 6.4 release notes.

The 6.4 release squad

The WordPress 6.4 release comes to you from an underrepresented gender release squad to welcome and empower diverse voices in the WordPress open source project.

Over several weeks, the 6.4 release squad kept the release on track and moving forward by leading collective work, connecting ideas, and removing roadblocks.

Thank you, contributors

WordPress believes in democratizing publishing and the freedoms that come with open source. Supporting this idea is a global and diverse community of people working together to strengthen the software.

WordPress 6.4 reflects the countless efforts and passion of more than 600 contributors in at least 56 countries. This release also welcomed over 170 first-time contributors!

Their collaboration delivered more than 1150 enhancements and fixes, ensuring a stable release for all—a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress open source community.

Over 60 locales have translated 90 percent or more of WordPress 6.4 into their language. Community translators are working hard to ensure more translations are on their way. Thank you to everyone who helps make WordPress available in 200 languages.

Last but not least, thanks to the volunteers who contribute to the support forums by answering questions from WordPress users worldwide.

Get involved

Participation in WordPress is not limited to coding. If contributing appeals to you, learning more and getting involved is easy. Discover the teams that come together to Make WordPress, and use this interactive tool to help you decide which is right for you.

Looking ahead

The present and future of WordPress hold exciting opportunities for everyone, builders and enterprises alike. The foundational work for Phase 3 of the roadmap continues, with efforts focused on fostering real-time collaboration and streamlining publishing flows to improve how creators and teams work together in WordPress.

A release haiku

In this show we talk with Topher about explaining what WordPress pros do for a living, the demographics of WordPress and teaching with video.

Adam Schweigert, an independent media and technology consultant, has released a plugin called Newspack Plugin Update Checker that enables self-hosted Newspack users to keep their plugins up-to-date. The Newspack project was launched in 2019 by WordPress.com, with support from the Google News Initiative, the Knight Foundation, and The Lenfest Institute. It provides local news organizations a powerful, yet cost effective publishing platform that promotes financial sustainability.

More than 200 news sites are on the hosted version of Newspack, which uses WordPress.com’s cloud platform. Organizations can also host their own Newspack installations independently, which includes a theme, collection of plugins, and blocks. KinshiPress, which publishes news and updates for WordPress publishers, has a guide to self-hosting Newspack that walks through the process of getting set up. It also mentions the drawback of the plugins being hosted on GitHub.

Schweigert’s Newspack Plugin Update Checker solves this problem by using a plugin updater library that checks for updates and lets users know when a new version is available. The notice appears in the dashboard in a similar way to how WordPress.org displays updates.

The plugin checks for updates for nine of the most commonly-used Newspack plugins, including the following:

Schweigert noted that the plugin requires the Newspack plugins be in folders named using their respective slugs. Although the plugin allows users to enable auto-updates, he recommends keeping an eye on the Newspack release notes to be prepared for any potentially breaking changes.

KinshiPress author Steve Burge recently published an article on the Newspack ecosystem, contending that Newspack has the potential to do for publishers what WooCommerce has done for e-commerce.

“There’s a big audience out for a publishing platform that is open source, highly extendable, and has the backing of a successful company and a strong community,” Burge said.” Where else can newspapers, magazines and radio stations go? They mostly go to WordPress already, but the platform we provide them could be much more targeted and helpful.”

Although Schweigert’s plugin is a good stop gap measure, Burge said he thinks putting the Newspack plugins on WordPress.org and improving the documentation would go a long way towards expanding its impact.

WordPress contributors have updated the Theme Handbook to include a new chapter on block templating. The chapter covers how the WordPress block template system works, how to build custom templates and parts and include them in a theme. This is critical documentation designed to provide a learning path for those who are building their first block themes.

Automattic-sponsored developer advocate Justin Tadlock announced the update on Twitter, noting that it also includes a couple of new docs in the Global Settings and Styles chapter for registering template-related features in theme.json, and the same for template parts.

The new chapter on block templating is just one part of a larger effort to overhaul the Theme Handbook for modern day WordPress. Contributors are transitioning the focus from classic theming to block theming, with just one chapter in the handbook devoted to classic themes.

“It was created during a time when classic themes were the only method of front-end design for WordPress,” Tadlock said in the proposal to overhaul the handbook. “Much of its content now exists in a transitory state between classic and modern block theming. This has created a scenario where the handbook sometimes reads more like patchwork than if it were built with a single vision. That is often a natural result of adding new documentation over years.”

The proposal does not recommend scrapping all of the existing content but rather carrying some of it forward to be updated and reorganized. A good portion of the existing content is still relevant to be migrated to the Classic Themes chapter.

Overhauling the Theme Handbook is a colossal effort that’s still ongoing. It’s being managed under a tracking ticket on GitHub. The new chapter better supports developers who are just figuring out how the WordPress block template system works, but there are many more chapters that need attention. Anyone who would like to get involved in the project can select any issue on the ticket to get started.

Nick Diego, a developer advocate at Automattic and core contributor, is the author of the popular Icon Block plugin that enables users to add custom SVG icons and graphics to the WordPress block editor. He is often asked if the plugin can add icons to the core Button block, but that is outside the scope of what it does. Last week he wrote a plugin that fulfills this feature request in a separate plugin without building a custom block.

The Enable Button Icons plugin is available on GitHub as an example that demonstrates how developers can lightly extend core blocks for features like this. Diego said he was inspired by WordPress developer Aki Hamano’s Enable Responsive Image plugin that adds settings to the Image block to elegantly display different images depending on the width of the screen.

“I wanted to use the WordPress image block to switch images on mobile, but I wanted something that would simply extend the core block without having to create a custom block, so I tried making one,” Hamano said. “For now, you can only add one image, and only the breakpoint and resolution can be switched.”

Diego said he doesn’t plan to add his Enable Button Icons plugin to the official WordPress directory.

“It works great, but it is not designed to support an entire library of icons, and I know that will be the first thing people ask for,” he said. “So, I’m thinking of keeping it as an example and encouraging people to take it and modify it as they want.”

I tested the plugin and it works perfectly but is certainly ripe for being extended to support a larger selection of icons. Alternatively, it may be useful for a brand that has a set number of custom designed icons they want to be easily accessible for use in Button blocks.

Diego will be running an event at the end of the month about how to extend core WordPress blocks, and the Enable Button Icons plugin will be part of that. It will be another segment in the “Developer Hours” series run through the Learn WordPress Online Workshops group on Meetup. Diego and a team of contributors just wrapped up a Developer Hours event today featuring a demo/walkthrough of the upcoming Twenty Twenty-Four default theme. Watch for the next event to be added to the schedule sometime this week.

Developers have been asking for more extensibility, hooks, and filters for the block editor, and an upcoming Hallway Hangout event will focus on triaging issues related to extending Gutenberg. Contributors will discuss the 110 outstanding issues labeled “Extensibility,” and 20 issues labeled “Blocks Adoption,” used for issues that directly impact the ability to adopt features of Gutenberg. Anyone who wants to share their opinions about block editor extensibility issues is invited to join.

Day 3 recap included a deep look at producing WooSesh, the Seshies awards and conversation around the days sessions.

Wordfence CLI 2.0.1 introduced free vulnerability scanning this week. The new CLI product was launched at WordCamp US two months ago with malware detection capabilities, but the latest update brings in the most highly requested feature – vulnerability scanning at scale.

Wordfence is most well-known for its Web Application Firewall, malware scanner, and login security product, which is packaged as a free plugin and installed on more than 4 million websites. The CLI is the first-ever command line malware and vulnerability scanner for WordPress servers. It is targeted at developers, site cleaners who scan large numbers of files for remediation, agencies, and hosting companies that want to scan across entire networks of millions of customers.

“Vulnerability scanning in Wordfence CLI 2.0.1 uses our own open vulnerability database,” Wordfence CEO Mark Maunder said. “The database itself is completely free for anyone to use, and includes APIs that are open, along with web hooks so that developers can build real-time alerting into their applications. Our mission is to secure the Web, and we think that having an open vulnerability database, with an open source, robust and high performance vulnerability scanner for servers furthers that mission.”

The vulnerability database includes responsible disclosures published by researchers for the benefit of the wider community.

“Because most vulnerabilities come from the research community, we believe they are public property,” Maunder said. “While some companies do charge for their collection of vulnerabilities, we don’t think it is appropriate to resell public property, which is why we created an open and completely free vulnerability database.”

The CLI vulnerability scans use the Wordfence Intelligence Vulnerability API feed, which is free for both personal and commercial use. It contains more than 12,250 unique vulnerability records affecting 7,600 plugins and themes. The Wordfence team adds an average of 82 new vulnerabilities per week.

Version 2.0.1, code named “Voodoo Child” simplifies installation so users no longer have to go to the Wordfence site to get an API key. The tool fetches the API key in the background to make it easier to get started.

Wordfence CLI is licensed under the GPLv3 and available on GitHub, along with documentation for installing, configuring, and running the application.

“Wordfence CLI is one of those projects where the product roadmap writes itself because there is such an obvious need for a powerful tool like this in the WordPress server administration space,” Wordfence lead developer Matt Barry said. “We’re in this for the long haul and will continue to invest heavily in Wordfence CLI, with your guidance.”

This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended that you evaluate RC3 on a test server and site.

WordPress 6.4 is slated for release on November 7, 2023—less than a week away. If you haven’t tried it, now is the time.

The WordPress 6.4 release is brought to you by an underrepresented gender release squad to welcome the participation and partnership of those who identify as gender-underrepresented in the WordPress open source project.

What’s in WordPress 6.4 RC3?

Thanks to everyone who has tested the beta and RC releases. Since RC2 was released on October 24, there have been more than 25 issues resolved. You can browse the technical details for all recent updates using these links:

PHP compatibility update

Contributing to 6.4

WordPress is open source software made possible by a community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development. The resources below outline various ways you can help, regardless of your technical expertise.

Get involved in testing

Your feedback and help in testing are vital to developing the WordPress software and ensuring its quality. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. Check out this guide for instructions on testing WordPress 6.4 features.

The core Query block requires more testing and feedback to ensure the latest changes to prevent full page reloads work smoothly. Please note that this setting was called “Enhanced pagination” but has recently been renamed, and it’s now referred to as “Force page reload” instead.

If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.

Search for vulnerabilities

Update your theme or plugin

Do you build themes and plugins? Your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for users worldwide.

Hopefully, you have already tested your themes and plugins with WordPress 6.4 betas. With RC3, you will want to continue your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.4.

Please post detailed information to the support forums if you find compatibility issues.

Documentation

Help the Docs team put the finishing touches on end-user documentation in time for the 6.4 release. Find out what’s needed and how you can help in this post.

Help translate WordPress

A RC3 haiku

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast, which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how translations of the WordPress project are created now and in the future.

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If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you all your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.

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So on the podcast today, we have Estela Rueda, Courtney Robertson and Javier Casares.

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Courtney is a former teacher who now focuses on contributing to WordPress. With a background in education, she understands the challenges faced by English second language learners in the American education system. She’s passionate about providing access to WordPress in multiple languages, as she believes it’s unfair to expect non-English speakers to simultaneously translate content and understand it.

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Estela is a language enthusiast who has spent years navigating the challenges of website localization. As a member of the WordPress community, Estela has come across the intricacies of language differences, and the need for accurate translation in various Spanish locales. With 14 Spanish locales to handle Estela’s expertise in understanding the subtle nuances, and localizations of each language variation has been indispensable.

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Javier is a dedicated member of the WordPress community, with expertise in creating documentation. Javier has been instrumental in developing handbooks for various sites. However, there have been some technical challenges. Despite these obstacles Javier, as you will hear, remains committed to addressing and solving the documentation issues at hand.

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This episode covers the important topic of translations, and making WordPress documentation more accessible to people worldwide. Our guests bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table, as they discuss the complexities and challenges of language translation in the WordPress ecosystem.

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We start by highlighting challenges posed in translating WordPress, such as the tangled processes currently in place, as well as more language focused topics. We talk about the extensive collaborative effort involved in translating WordPress, and the plans to expand translation efforts to documentation with the help of dedicated teams.

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We get into how contributors might need to rethink how many of the current translation processes are structured. We discuss the different approaches needed for translating plugins and themes versus documentation. We touch upon how technical aspects of these processes such as content creation and updates also pose significant challenges.

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All three guests stress the importance of global involvement in translation efforts, including translators, reviewers, and project managers. They advocate for the development of standardized style guides for each language to maintain consistency. And they explore the possibility of creating software, or tools, to manage translation tasks.

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Courtney, Estela and Javier all acknowledge the challenges ahead, but express optimism that their ideas will help make WordPress accessible for all. Communicating how WordPress is built and how it works is an endeavor tightly aligned with the projects overall mission of democratizing publishing.

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If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

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And so without further delay, I bring you Estela Rueda, Courtney Robertson and Javier Casares.

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I am joined on the podcast today by three fine people. I’m joined by Courtney Robertson, Estela Rueda and Javier Casares. Hello all three of you.

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[00:04:48] Javier Casares: Hello.

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[00:04:49] Estela Rueda: Hi Nathan.

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[00:04:50] Courtney Robertson: Hello.

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[00:04:51] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you on the podcast today. We’re going to be talking about WordPress translations, and the way that we can make it easier for people from around the globe to get access to WordPress documentation. It’s a very important subject and there’s been a lot of work, albeit that you may not know about it. There’s been an awful lot of work going on over, well more or less a decade, and we’ll find out more about that in a moment.

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But first of all I think it’s important that everybody gets a little window to introduce themselves, do a quick bio. So if I take you one at a time and lets start with Courtney. Just tell us who you are. And I know that I’m going to say can we be brief but I know time is short, so let’s keep it fairly brief if that’s all right.

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[00:05:33] Courtney Robertson: Sure thing. I’ve been contributing to WordPress since 2009. A big part of the training team for many years. These days you can also find me over in Meta, Sustainability, and generally around the project on behalf of GoDaddy these days, and I’ve been there for about two and a half years. Long time contributor. Big fan.

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[00:05:50] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. I’m sure that people have come across Courtney in the past, as would be the case for the next two people. Let’s go for Estela next. Hello Estela, would you mind giving us your intro?

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[00:06:01] Estela Rueda: Hi Nathan. Yes. I’ve been contributing for about five years already and I am mostly in the design and the documentation teams. But you can find me everywhere. I do mess around everywhere, I ask questions. And my goal has been to rearrange, recategorise the end user documentation. And that’s been the big project that we finished, it took us three years. And now we want to bring it up to the whole world in every single language we can manage.

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[00:06:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay thank you. And finally Javier, if you want to just give us your short bio.

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[00:06:37] Javier Casares: Yeah. Hello everybody. I’m Javier Casares, I’m from Spain. I’ve been involved with WordPress since 2006, so more or less 17 years. I mainly focus on hosting, on the hosting team, and I’m helping the documentation team mainly with the Advanced Administration Handbook. So that’s more or less what I do. I do a lot of things but those are the main things.

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[00:07:04] Nathan Wrigley: Those are the things which are pertinent to today’s discussion. Yeah, thank you so much.

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So if, like me, you are a native English speaker, English is your first language. It may very well be that some of the things that we’re going to talk about today have either never occurred to you, or you’ve never bumped up against this problem.

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Because broadly speaking, if you are a native English speaker, you can find the documentation, you can find tutorials. You can find almost anything you wish to find out about WordPress, how to use it, how to implement things and so on, by going and doing a Google search. And you’re off to the races because essentially everything has historically been done in the English language.

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So I guess that, in my case, makes me an incredibly fortunate person. But that’s not the case throughout the world. And as obviously WordPress has grown, we’re now 40 plus percent of the internet, it would be not really serving the user base of WordPress if everything was simply in English. It would be a laudable goal to get everything translated.

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Now I guess we should probably outline where all of the things are at the moment. So it’s not the case that you can go to one website and there it all is, open a Pandora’s box, open it all and there it all is.

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So let’s outline that problem first. I don’t really mind who wishes to tackle this one. Yeah if somebody wants to just outline the problem that we face, where are all the documents stored at the moment?

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[00:08:23] Estela Rueda: I can’t give it a go. There are many, many limitations within WordPress. There are the sites that are called the Rosetta sites, or locales and those are the ones that are written in other languages for local teams.

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But then we have issues, different issues. For instance, in Spanish, we have 14 locales in Spanish. So we have Spanish from Spain, we have Spanish from Mexico, Spanish from Colombia, Spanish from Costa Rica, et cetera. And everybody will think, well don’t you understand each other? Yeah we do, we understand each other, but there are so many differences in our languages. And there is the localisation of the words, and a lot of little things that we need to figure out. That’s one thing.

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Then the other thing is that there are never enough contributors to do translations. And then there are all the technical issues that we have, and Javier can talk to you about those, because he’s more aware than all of the technical issues that we have.

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[00:09:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, in that case, we’ll hopefully segue over to Javier. Are you able to take it from there?

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[00:09:29] Javier Casares: Yeah. So the main thing is, we have the Rosetta sites. It’s local team can create their own documentation in a way, because some of the sites have their own handbooks. But there is some technical things there because, for example, the Spanish from Spain is one of the older sites in the WordPress network.

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So it’s database is in LATIN1, it’s not in UTF, it’s a technical thing. But it doesn’t allow, for example, emojis in the database. That’s so simple but it’s something that happens. So we have some problems having documentation there. That’s one of the things.

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But the other one is we have the documentation right now in wordpress.org/documentation. Also we have the developer.wordpress.org. We have the Learn corpus also in with a lot of documentation. In a lot of ways, WordPress TV should, maybe it’s another place with documentation, in video in this case. And everything usually is focused on English.

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So the main idea on this project we started like a year ago is, how can we translate everything into, more or less, at least eight languages? Because eight languages cover more or less eighty percent of the WordPress users. And also, where are we going to put that documentation? Because, for example, we can do ses.wordpress.org/documentation, that’s the easy one. But, for example, the developer documentation is in a subdomain so, where are we going to put all this documentation?

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So that’s one of the things we are trying to solve. That’s one technical problem we have to face. And the other one is, where are we going to put all the documentation to be translated? Because we know that WordPress will be multilingual in a way in some years. I hope soon, as soon as possible.

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We have now the phase three, the collaboration part. But we have the problem that we cannot give access in this case. This is something concrete for WordPress, not for a translation or a documentation problem. But we cannot give access to thousands of people to the WordPress network, because it won’t be able to control the security and everything.

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We decided to start migrating or having the English documentation in GitHub. That’s one place. Also GitHub has natively, the Markdown editor, so with some commands and some things we can put everything there in a way that everybody can take the English document and translate it into their language.

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For example I’m doing that, I’m starting to do that in a beta project for the advanced documentation. That’s something we’ve been working on for more or less 8 months. It was a very difficult thing to arrive because it’s been a big problem. A lot of people have been involved, a lot of languages, people from different countries involved, a lot of teams involved. So it has been a very technical challenge in a way.

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[00:13:00] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. I don’t know if Courtney wants to add anything to that before we move on.

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[00:13:05] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. So my background, before going full time contributing to WordPress, was that of a teacher. And in the education space within America we have a lot of ESL, English Second Language. So we have a lot of people that don’t primarily speak English, and it’s a disservice to them in the education system to expect them to understand the content on top of having to simultaneously translate a language. That’s a really big learning difficulty.

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So I very much wholeheartedly believe in providing access for people to learn WordPress in their own languages. Down to reading the captions on videos. If you’re an English speaker I would encourage you to go over to wordpress.tv, try to find a video that is not in your language, not in your first language, and subject yourselves to reading the captions and think about how fair is that for the rest of the world.

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So with that in mind, in Learn WordPress we have a different workflow perhaps than the Docs team. So Docs again think of as the dictionary and the reference manuals, and Learn as the teacher’s spot to be, or the direct learner’s spot to go, if they don’t find reading the manual version to meet their learning style.

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And that’s something that we very much want to consider. Some people need a little more instruction to be able to get the concepts. And so Learn WordPress exists for that, both direct learners and educators. And over there we do not get access to Rosetta sites and instead we rely upon one instance of Learn WordPress.

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Whereas in the Rosetta sites and what we’ve heard from recent episodes with Vagelis and Piermario, just a few episodes back. We could hear that from what they’ve shared in other parts of the WordPress project there are tools to basically make a whole separate locale instance going on. So if you were in Spain and you wanted to read the same type of content, you would have an entire version of the site that is just for you.

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Whereas with Learn WordPress, what we have going on is all the languages all smooshed into one site. And what becomes difficult is we don’t have good workflows yet established around if the English language version gets an update, how do I assess what content? I speak only a tiny bit of Spanish and a tiny bit of Latin, of all the things. Good conversation starters.

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So you won’t find an easy way to identify even what the other topics are with the same title. Let alone somebody that can’t assess what that content looks like. So we have some locale ambassadors, Piermario is doing a great job with the folks based out of Italy on rounding up some efforts there. Margarita especially, is someone that’s participating with Piermario on identifying the content to be translated into the Italian locale.

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So we’re basically duplicating the content, but just in other languages all under the same site. So that’s not the most efficient way and we’re using GitHub as well to do some of this work. We have GitHub issues that have a template. So think of GitHub issues as logging something on the WordPress forums, right? It’s about on par with that. But we prefill what the text of that issue is, and have a workflow to publish that.

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But that’s not necessarily in conjunction with what the English version, last update, is or plans of how do we maintain those updates? And then, how do we also look and see if the Docs team did a certain bit of update? And how do we find the polyglots that really like these specific areas? You can see this becomes quite a challenge as we’re looking ahead to Gutenberg phase four with multilingual support natively. We’re still a ways out from that, but you can see where this is something to start untangling and working on internally before we roll it all into Core.

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[00:16:59] Nathan Wrigley: So it sounds like that this is a spaghetti of things just loosely held together simply by people actually understanding what the processes of the different teams are. But we don’t have this one workflow, which presumably is some kind of goal. But we do have a moment in time, which would be the release of Gutenberg phase four, where hopefully a large proportion of this would be either in progress or completed, because at that point WordPress itself becomes translatable. And I suppose at that point it would be incredibly useful to have this work done.

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I just want to touch on a couple of things that may have confused the listeners because we’re all speaking, probably in a bit of an echo chamber here. And so there were a couple of things which were mentioned. The first of which was Rosetta, that got dropped a couple of times, and it may be useful for people to actually know what that means. So if anybody’s willing to just very briefly explain what Rosetta is. I mean we know what the stone is and so we get the connection there but, what is that thing in WordPress?

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[00:17:57] Javier Casares: The Rosetta sites are the locale sites in WordPress. So we have wordpress.org, everything is in English, it’s the main site. Most of everything is there. But, for example, for Spain we have es.wordpress.org, or for Catalan we have ca.wordpress.org or I don’t know for French we have fr.wordpress.org.

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Those are translation sites from the main site, but not everything is in there. There are the main contents, for example, the download page, everything is in your language. When you download the WordPress from that site, it’s in your language. It includes the translation files. But each site can be managed by different people.

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For example, in Spain we usually publish one post every week talking about things. It can be translation from general post, or it can be local things about WordCamps in Spain or whatever. So that’s more or less the thing inside the Rosetta. It’s the technical name, the project, the Rosetta project is the name or the locale site. So that’s more or less the thing.

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[00:19:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah thank you, that’s perfect. That explains it beautifully.

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The other thing that was mentioned was eight languages have been put forward as the language is to get us to 80%. So I guess it would be quite nice for the listeners to know what those languages are. I don’t know if a quick Google search needs to be done there, or if anybody’s got that information to hand. But it would be nice to know eight languages initially are.

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And also to know that isn’t the entire scope of the project. That’s more a, let’s get something over the line with these eight languages, as opposed to that’s what we’re doing and that’s all that we’ll ever do.

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[00:19:44] Javier Casares: Yeah. I have some information from the hosting team, and it was like, okay, I’m going to analyse where and what language are the most downloaded in WordPress. So these languages are not the eight most top languages in the world, they are are the most used in the WordPress ecosystem.

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So that’s the main idea behind having those languages as the main ones. German, more or less the 6% in the WordPress scope. English, the 48%, Spanish 7%, French 5%, Italian 4%, Japanese 6%, Portuguese 5%, and Russian 3%. More or less that covers the 80% of the documentation or languages that WordPress has installations.

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[00:20:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay thank you, that’s great. That clears that one up.

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So I guess we’ve highlighted a problematic past, well not really problematic, it’s just the way the project evolved where everything is done in a unique way depending on the team, or which part of WordPress you’re touching. And maybe this one is for Estela. The enterprise of this podcast really is to highlight some future where we improve things and we take things forward, and you have outlined, I guess a project is the best way to describe it.

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What is your idea? What is it that you want to happen in the future? We don’t have to create timelines or anything, but let’s just imagine that we’re a decade out from now and it’s all been achieved, what would be your north star for all of this?

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[00:21:16] Estela Rueda: This is where we are, you know where we are working at right now, where we are starting. I started with this Spanish team. They are my trial team. And the only reason why I started with them is because I speak Spanish and it’s easier for me to guide them. We had to start the project in, you know, baby steps, go little by little. The idea is to create a process or a model that we can replicate into other languages.

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I started with the style guide and how to write documentation in Spanish, because we have many grammar issues with the language. First of all, you know, we have the way we address each other, like formal, informal or we have the language is genderised, completely genderised. Everything is either female or male, there is no neutral gender in Spanish.

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There are so many issues that we need to address. And I’m pretty sure other languages have the same or similar problems in their grammar, you know, grammatically speaking. And we need to address those and, how are we going to use them in documentation, in order to make it as neutral as possible and as easy to understand? They’re going to be like, you know, writing rules.

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Then we have the translation of the sitemap. Now, what I did with the Spanish team, we spent during a WordC amp, a whole contributor day, translating the site map for end user documentation. But I sat the marketing, the polyglots, and the documentation teams together. And I told them, okay, we’re going to translate but I don’t want you to translate literally. I asked marketing, give us words that are searched for, that will help with the SEO of the site. So that way we can localise also, and we can increase the use of the translation of WordPress.

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After that, I guess we’re going to start working into translating documentation. We’re going to create teams, and we’re going to start working on it. My idea is to start some sort of triage hours with teams. And let’s say twice a month, to review what we have written and to continue writing and just that sort of thing.

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Because I know that if I leave it to every contributor day for every WordCamp it’s just never going to happen. And this is something that we need. If we want to progress we need to work, you know, a little bit every day, a little bit every day.

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So if we don’t put set goals then this is not going to happen. But that’s where I am right now. And I will reach out to the Brazilian team who approached me and may be the second team that I start working with.

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[00:23:56] Nathan Wrigley: So Estela, just to be clear the intention here is to delve into, in your case, the Spanish language and come up with a rule set, like a workflow. Where, okay, if we receive things in English, these are the set of constraints that we’ve got when we translate into Spanish. So somebody who is new to the team would be able to look at those guidelines, the workflow document, whatever it may be and have a very strong idea of, okay, this is the way to do it. When you’re going from English to Spanish, this is how you do it. Have I understood that correctly?

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[00:24:29] Estela Rueda: Yes. But those writing rules, or the style guide, I call them the writing rules because that’s what they are. But I want to apply that for every language, just not for the Spanish team. And that style guide has to be according to the language grammar, not to what we like.

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[00:24:45] Nathan Wrigley: In my head I’m seeing a website when you say that, but of course, you’re talking about the style of the language, in your case the sort of gender that you’ve got to go to and things like that. That’s interesting. And, can you give us some sort of insight into how that’s going? Has it proven to be fairly straightforward to put that workflow together or is it a really thorny thing to unpick?

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[00:25:03] Estela Rueda: We are just at the beginning of it. I just pitched this idea at the WordCamp in Pontevedra, which was last month, two months ago. And I realised that I need to sit down and start writing. So I gave them some sort of topics that might affect the language, and gave it to the team, to the Spanish team actually.

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They are going to start writing the style guide. And I said listen, I write something, ideas that I have and if they are not okay, feel free to go ahead and edit and change them. And let’s see what affects us where. Is it easy? No it’s not easy. It’s going to be difficult because like I said, we have 14 locales, or 14 Rosetta sites, for 14 different versions of Spanish. And we need to come together to a point where, what is the most common use for everybody?

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[00:26:03] Nathan Wrigley: So this question is going to sound a bit meta, meta in the real sense of the word. You are creating a document which then you will be able to share to other teams in order that they can run their own process. So a silly example, the Latin version of WordPress would need to look at what your team have put together, how to go through the process? Which they can then implement with their own locale.

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[00:26:28] Estela Rueda: Yes. I will be documenting. Actually this week I’m going to publish a post in the Polyglots team regarding about this step one, step two. So what is the writing style guide and why are we writing it? And what happened to the sitemap and how we came up to what we have.

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[00:26:44] Nathan Wrigley: So just talking about it on this podcast, it seems like a fairly solvable problem, but of course when you actually apply thought to it, this really is a gigantic plate of spaghetti. There’s an awful lot to be unpicked. There’s an awful lot of work to be done. And I’m just wondering how you feel about this, whether you’re sanguine.

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And it’s not necessarily for Estela, it’s for everybody on the call. How you feel about whether this project is going to be able to ship its aspiration in the, well let’s say, it’s probably a matter of years not months certainly, but probably under a decade, before Gutenberg four comes out.

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Because it does sound, on the face of it, it sounds like you’ve got an awful lot of work to be done. If you complete the Spanish, then you’ve got to move on to another one. You’ve got to get people’s buy in, you’ve got to re educate those people who are contributing their time, as translators. They’ve got to be re educated to do it in a different way. How positive, sanguine do you feel that this is achievable?

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[00:27:41] Courtney Robertson: Nathan, I’ll jump in here. One of the ideas that a coach in my life has shared with me, the motto of this company is, a world that works for everyone with no one left out. And I think about that a lot in the context of open source, and how we make WordPress possible for the whole globe, right?

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We are trying to make this tool that we have available, be available for as many people as would have used it, and make the best of that situation. And if we take that backwards to a place where we might need a mindset shift to go on, let’s think about a couple of features in the WordPress project that have rolled out within the last few versions of releases, and the naming that goes into it.

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I know the community would like to improve how we name things from this outset, so that we don’t have to rename them later. So one example that I thought went really, really well is what became the Command Palette. The initial proposal was to call it something along the lines of Wayfinder. And one of the great insights, because we were able to identify and put this kind of call out across social media and other places, it was not something that was just buried and obscure over in GitHub.

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It was raised throughout the community and a lot of folks said, that doesn’t make sense in my language. If you do a direct translation this does not make sense. So it’s not just about translating after the fact, but it’s also about how we name things really even before it gets widely publicly released.

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And so that’s a mindset shift that I think, I’ll say as an English speaker, I really think that we need to experience more of being the second language to truly appreciate and understand the depth of why naming things matters so greatly. The depth of why we need to consider how this will work with other languages. Consider the workflow process. To the point where we’re not just, yes, it will probably remain English forward first.

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But to always tuck in mind the processes that go on downstream after we get the thing out in English or what have you. What are we asking our translation folks to do, and how does this impact somebody in a different language? I learned that when Learn was added the navigation menu across all WordPress sites, that the way it had been translated, particularly into Russian, Olga caught this one, it didn’t make sense in the way that it was translated. And so we have to think about these things before we just ship sometimes.

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[00:30:22] Nathan Wrigley: I have this intuition that if the Command Palette had been called something, even adjacent to the Command Palette, it would have stayed like that. It the controversy of it being so poorly named that led the community to sort of say, well that’s really not the right idea.

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And so sometimes I wonder if backing yourself into a corner is the best way to get attention, if you know what I mean. It’s probably not the desirable outcome but it is possibly a way that, you know, people get enraged by something and so they go out on social media and change happens more quickly.

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From what I’m hearing there Courtney, you’re basically making a moral argument for this. It’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t matter what the goal is, whether we achieve this in a matter of 2 years, 6 years, 10 years, whatever it may be. The journey is the important thing, making the steps now to make this possible is the important point, not the end goal.

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[00:31:11] Courtney Robertson: Absolutely true. Yes.

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[00:31:13] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you.

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So I guess in order for this to happen, as with many things in WordPress, bodies need to be on the ground. We need people actually doing this work. There’s probably a whole lot of people listening to this who are already committing their time to translations, but there’s probably a lot of people who haven’t. So I guess we need to speak to them.

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Firstly, I suppose we need to reassure people that if in the future, if this project has wings and takes off and it all goes in this direction, that they will be educated in the new ways of doing things. But also a call out to people who haven’t yet committed their time and feel that they could commit their time. How do they go about doing it?

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So let’s tackle it in two parts. The first one, to people who are already translating, will there be education materials? Will there be instruction as to whatever comes out of this whole process?

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[00:32:04] Javier Casares: Okay. So for me, we will need two different teams. This is not a polyglots project in a way. Obviously everybody will be invited to participate on everything, but I don’t think that the same people translating WordPress plugins, themes or whatever, needs to be the same people translating documentation.

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So in a way, at least for me, because I think those are two very different things. As Courtney was saying, translating a plugin for example, or WordPress per se, maybe you need to be a little more literal in the translation. But documentation is different because people need to learn about what you are explaining. So you need to relate with that person.

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So in this case that’s the work Estela is doing. You need to know how to communicate to these people, and that’s very different than translating a thing. So for me, it’s not like translating documentation is adapting or doing your own documentation based on one in another language.

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So we don’t need to have the same documentation because, cultural things or whatever. Because not everybody in all the countries, in all the languages, use the same tools, the same things. So that’s one thing we need to have in mind. For example, as I was saying at the beginning, I just started leading the advanced administration handbook like one year or two years ago. That’s something Milana gave me as a gift in a way.

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So one thing I started, for me this is the pilot in the technical part, not in the documentation part. But now the only thing, or main thing we have in GitHub, in English, everything synchronised with WordPress, is the advanced admin handbook. So for me the next step is to do the technical part for this translation.

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We need to check also the technical part because writing right is one thing, but doing the thing is another step we need to check. And that creates a lot of new problems in a way. Because we have new content, we have updates, and we have changes in the documentation. Because it’s not the same changing or creating a new feature, because I don’t know the command palette and everything. It’s a new thing from one, two versions ago.

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So we need to create all the documentation. We need to notify everybody in all the languages that we have this new. So we need to translate everything and we need to check with the Polyglots team, how are you going to name the palette in your language and everything? Everybody should be involved in a way, because documenting in all the languages should be a global thing, not a local thing.

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And also, the notifications. We need to have like three levels in the translation part, because we need the translators. We need people doing the translation per se. And we need something like the GTEs. So people can check that the translation is doing fine, the translation is right. And we need project managers because each documentation is not the same. The advanced admin handbook, the end user documentation, the Learn WordPress whatever, the plugins handbook, the themes handbook, developers handbook. Each documentation needs one or two or a team that can control the publication that everything is right.

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For example, one thing we talk in WordCamp US was how we are going to relate it’s language? Because we don’t have that now. So if we publish the documentation in Spanish and somebody wants to go from this page to another language, how are we going to do that? Because that’s not something we have now.

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So we are trying to solve phase four before we have phase four. So we have a lot of challenge in the organisation and in the technical part. Also with the translation or the organisation about how we are going to talk to people. Because, for example, the Spanish for me is one of the best examples, because in Spain we have a more direct, we talk to people and in Latin American they talk in another way.

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So we need to find like a common ground because we cannot maintain the Spanish documentation in 12 or 15 different ways. So we need to create a standard or international Spanish. That’s something that more or less exists, but we cannot create a lot of different documentation. So we need to have that in the translation part. We need to have that documentation, that style guide. We need to have one international Spanish because we cannot maintain, we don’t have a lot of people maintaining some little languages or whatever, because it’s not possible right now in the WordPress ecosystem.

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[00:37:35] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That was really insightful. I got an awful lot out of that. I just have a little question off the back of that. So, is the intention then to build I guess more or less software to take care of this notification problem? And obviously there’s a lot more than notifications. There’s, you know, the work that needs to be done, and perhaps the order that it needs to be done, and who it’s going to be assigned to.

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Is the intention to have that as, if you like, paper based web pages or is the intention to have a piece of software that people can log into and assign themselves tasks, and offload tasks, and check things out, and then finally hit publish if something meets all of the different criteria? And it sounded like it was partially done but I don’t know if that’s falling on your shoulders Javier. Just a little guidance around that.

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[00:38:18] Javier Casares: Yeah. that was one of the main things we have pending. We started talking about this in WordCamp US, in the contributor day. Right now, for example, for the advanced admin handbook I’m going to lead everything in the Spanish part because I think we need to test everything, and I’m going to test this development part or whatever we are doing. I know Milana is doing it for the end user. She’s creating like teams in GitHub and doing actions and everything.

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She’s starting to automatising more or less the notifications and everything. So the main idea is we will have translation teams. So for example, the Spanish translation team, or the German translation team. And you will apply in those teams. And when something changed, in the English part, you will get a notification.

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For example, there is a new page. This document has changed because of whatever. So we need to inform people that we need a new version, or to update something, or to add something to the documentation. And then we need another step that when somebody translates something, it needs some checking or review or whatever. So we need like the GTEs in Polyglots more or less, the general translation editor. So people that know imperfection, the style guide or whatever. And they will check that this document is ready to be published.

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This is something we start talking and I think it will be something good for the project, is to create versions for the documentation. When we have 6.4 or 6.5 or whatever version, we can create a new batch of documentation, and we can create the 1.2 version of the end user documentation. So we can have a history of everything that changed, and we don’t need to put the documentation every day.

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So we can have a weekly or a monthly updating. So it’s control, it’s more like the WordPress. So everybody will know where the new version is going to be published. If you need to add this document, priorities or whatever. So that’s something we are working on now, but there are a lot of people involved testing different things.

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So for example, Estela is doing the documentation for Spanish. I’m testing the technical part. Milana is testing this notification system. So we need to check everything because we don’t really know if this project is going to be real, but we think it will be. But we need to check everything, and we need to do this in parallel because we cannot wait to have all the work from one person to do the next step.

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I think that’s something we are going to work on in the next contributor days in some places. At least in Spain I’m going to try to do this. And for example, that’s my next step in the documentation part, is going to test this technical part. How are we going to organise everything?

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So everybody is invited to participate. So if anybody wants to check things, we can talk. Probably in the Polyglots or the documentation channel in Slack. So I think a lot of people are doing the right steps right now, and before 2024 we have some pilot or something finished.

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[00:42:02] Nathan Wrigley: If you’ve ever been involved in creating software, you’ll know that the devil is in the detail. And although it’s easy to say what you’ve just said, I suspect that it will be fiendishly challenging.

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Firstly, good luck, I hope that your endeavors pay off. And it does sound like you would desperately want some people to cast their eyes over this.

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And we’ll get onto that in a moment. We’ll figure out a way where people can get in touch if they wish to. But you’re clearly all good people. You have the, what I’m going to describe as the right moral intentions here. You are giving up lots of your time for this worthy cause. Nobody could deny that this is a fabulous endeavor.

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But for people who are listening to this and sitting on the fence, thinking to themselves, what would I get out of translating? It’s a bit of an ephemeral question really, but I’m wondering if you could portray or explain to us, what do you get out of this? Apart from the fact that you’ve translated a software project, that much is obvious. But, do you get like a warm, fuzzy feeling out of this? Does it make you feel good? Is there a good community? Are there nice people sitting behind translation that you’ve become friends with? I’m trying to offer a path for people who kind of want to commit but haven’t committed, because they just see it as there’s more things to do on my plate each week.

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[00:43:13] Estela Rueda: I think that friendships, they just come. They are just like part of it. But that’s not the reason why I do it. For me it’s more about empowering people. I think that, you know, if I can translate more of the documentation in another language then there will be more plugin developers, or theme developers, or agencies in that country. And then you will empower people. You will empower more people because they will be able to start their own businesses, you know, create their own little plugins and start small like we all did at some point, and then become bigger and bigger.

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I don’t know, I kind of took into that Matt’s dream about a hundred years. I think that if we open everything up for more countries, more cultures to join, then WordPress will be bigger and bigger and more people will use it.

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[00:44:10] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much, Courtney. I think maybe you want to chip in there.

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[00:44:13] Courtney Robertson: I really love solving complex puzzles. And so if we look, devils in the details. Relaying communications between docs and training becomes pretty important. So not only do we want to leverage Milana’s system about the GitHub actions, some of that automation work that can notify people in other languages. But also the communication between the teams about the same topics or the areas in which our topics overlap. It’s a fun thing for me to do that.

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But then in addition, as I kind of look more broadly like Estela, I firmly believe in empowering others. And that’s really what open source and the four freedoms give us. You are free to do what you would like with this thing.

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So to make that possible my method is to solve big problems, I guess. To work on these interesting challenges so that more people can leverage what’s going on and get involved along the way, and have mentors and others to connect with. Because for every time that I felt personally like I didn’t know what was going on, or I didn’t understand the value that I brought, or understand how I could start contributing with something small, I want to remove those barriers for other people. I want to make their lives a lot better from that process.

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[00:45:34] Nathan Wrigley: What a fabulous set of answers. Thank you so much.

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We’re running short of time. I guess the only thing that we should say before we wrap up is to give out a shout to people who are sitting on the fence, who haven’t contributed so far. What is the best way, the quickest route to finding out more? Is there a particular page that you would highlight more than any others? Is there a particular venue to go to? Is this a contributor day kind of thing? What would you recommend? We could take that one at a time. So let’s start with, well let’s go back to Courtney.

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[00:46:05] Courtney Robertson: Sure. Since our process looks a little bit different than what you see in Docs, for instance, I would encourage folks to swing by the training team. You can find our main site at make. wordpress. org slash training. There is a handbook in our top navigation area and inside of that has some information on how to get started with content localization. I’ll make sure that we have all those show notes. As well as a GitHub issue to log if you want to take part in that translation effort.

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And for those inside the WordPress project that are really skilled with amazing things like GitHub Actions, if you understand how to make GitHub automate some stuff, there is a channel if you search for GitHub inside of the channels area, you’ll find a channel where we share tips and tools about GitHub activity.

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[00:46:51] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much, Courtney. Estela, anything that you wanted to add?

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[00:46:55] Estela Rueda: You can go into documentation Slack channels. We meet on Tuesdays, 2 PM UTC, and just join us. And then we can talk about it. We are trying to look now for Documentation writers, but they are also bilingual. So they do need to dominate at least one word so that they can help us in the future once we move into their own language.

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We have, actually the documentation team is, most of us are non English speakers. English is not our first language, so we have a lot of people that speak other languages, and they do help when it’s necessary. Now, we have several posts. I’m posting, like I said, I’m documenting what I’m doing, and we’ll be documenting it both in Documentation and polyglots, and just pick it up from there. Join the polyglots team. They are open to every language, or every Rosetta side, locale team. They all need contributors. They all need translators. So that’s the best way.

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[00:48:01] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. And Javier, if you’ve got anything to add there.

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[00:48:05] Javier Casares: Yeah. In my case if anybody wants to check the most technical part or be involved in the testing, they can ask me directly in Slack. Because right now it’s like I’m doing the test alone. I probably when I do the main testing, I will explain everything because we did the proposal in the make.wordpress.org slash project. You can look for a proposal, documentation, translation, localization.

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That’s the main document explaining everything. It explains why we are doing this. How we are going to do that. I think, right now, Estela, Courtney, Milana, and I are the ones involved. So another way is to, at least for this project, is to contact us, and we will try to put you in the right place to contribute.

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Yeah, we are always open to help people. So another way is to contact directly to us.

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[00:49:09] Nathan Wrigley: Well, Thank you so much, the three of you, for joining us today. Thank you Courtney, Estela, and Javier. I really appreciate it. Obviously, a very complicated set of challenges to come, but hopefully with your and other people’s contributions, WordPress will be readable by all the world. Thank you so much for your contributions today.

Courtney is a former teacher who now focuses on contributing to WordPress. With a background in education, she understands the challenges faced by English Second Language (ESL) learners in the American education system. She’s passionate about providing access to WordPress in multiple languages, as she believes it is unfair to expect non-English speakers to simultaneously translate content and understand it.

Estela is a language enthusiast who has spent years navigating the challenges of website localization. As a member of the WordPress community, Estela has come across the intricacies of language differences and the need for accurate translation in various Spanish locales. With 14 different Spanish locales to handle, Estela’s expertise in understanding the subtle nuances and localizations of each language variation has been indispensable.

Javier Casares is a dedicated member of the WordPress community. With expertise in creating documentation, Javier has been instrumental in developing handbooks for various sites. However, there have been some technical challenges. Despite these obstacles, Javier, as you will hear, remains committed to addressing and solving the documentation issues at hand.

This episode covers the important topic of translations and making WordPress documentation more accessible to people worldwide. Our guests bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table as they discuss the complexities and challenges of language translation in the WordPress ecosystem.

We start by highlighting challenges posed in translating WordPress, such as the tangled processes currently in place, as well as more language focussed topics. We talk about the extensive collaborative effort involved in translating WordPress and the plans to expand translation efforts to documentation with the help of dedicated teams.

We get into how contributors might need to rethink the way that many of the current translation processes are structured. We discuss the different approaches needed for translating plugins and themes versus documentation. We touch upon how technical aspects of these processes, such as content creation and updates, also pose significant challenges.

All three guests stress the importance of global involvement in translation efforts, including translators, reviewers, and project managers. They advocate for the development of standardised style guides for each language to maintain consistency, and they explore the possibility of creating software or tools to manage translation tasks.

Courtney, Estela, and Javier all acknowledge the challenges ahead, but express optimism that their ideas will help make WordPress accessible for all. Communicating how WordPress is built and how it works is an endeavour tightly aligned with the project’s overall mission of democratising publishing.

Notes provided by the guests

We want to offer non-English speaking people the possibility to access all the WordPress documentation in their language. To accomplish that we need to translate all the actual documentation at HelpHub, DevHub, Learn WordPress and some Handbooks.

But, the problems are not to do the translations per sé, but where to put that in each language, how to get the updates from the English primary documentation, and then how to maintain everything in place.

First, we need to know where are we putting the documentation, because this project cannot wait until Gutenberg Phase 4. This means that Local Communities should be involved here (for example, where are we putting the documentation in Spanish? es.wordpress.org/documentation, developer.es.wordpress.org?)

After having the right place… how are we going to know if something changes? The best way is probably using the same way we are translating right now: translate.wordpress.org, (GlotPress). If we can use this platform, each page can be translated and, when arrived to the 90% threshold, it will be shown in the local language page.

Links provided by the guests

Useful links

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Growing up, my family didn’t have much. Yet, a quote always resonated with me: “If you’re born poor, it’s not your fault. But if you die poor, it’s your fault.” My humble beginnings never deterred my aspirations.

As a child, my exposure to technology was limited. In our village, neither schools nor homes had computers or mobile phones. My fascination with technology was sparked by sci-fi movies I watched on television, where characters operated these machines called “computers.”. That first moment when I laid my eyes on a computer, I knew my life was about to change. The real encounter with a computer came in 2006 when a neighbor purchased one.

Finding The Internet

In 2008, My family moved to the town and it opened up a world of opportunities. Later that year a friend introduced me to a Cyber Café, where for just 20 Indian Rupees (24 cents US), I could play games for an hour. After saving the money for two weeks, I visited the café for the first time. Over time, my interest shifted from playing games to exploring the computer itself. It was a Windows XP machine, and I recall being intrigued by its features. This exploration continued almost every month for the next two to three years.

By 2011, I had become proficient with the internet and was familiar with operating systems like Windows, Linux, and Mac. That year, my father bought me my first phone, a Nokia 7210 Supernova. While it wasn’t a smartphone, it sparked my curiosity about the creation of software and websites.

Initially overwhelmed by the complexity, I decided to push forward, and by the end of the year, I had launched my first website using an online builder and my Nokia phone.

Teaching Myself, Teaching Others

My passion for technology only grew from there. I self-taught programming languages like JavaScript, PHP, Python, Java, C, and C++. I also learned computer hardware maintenance and served as a go-to tech helper in my community. Impressively, I became a full-time Teacher and SysAdmin for a local school, managing five servers and around a hundred computers. All of this knowledge came from internet tutorials.

Yet, a few months later, my discovery of WordPress.org profoundly shifted my perspective. By 2014, I had set up my own WordPress blog. Despite juggling a demanding college schedule and coursework, I consistently set aside time each night to keep up with the latest developments in WordPress and other web technologies. Much of what I’ve learned comes from the generosity of online communities. In gratitude, I’m eager to share my own experiences, hoping to guide others on similar paths.

Being a teacher was a fulfilling and enjoyable experience. One of the highlights for me was the opportunity to share my knowledge with the children and witness their growth and development. Teaching stands out as one of the most rewarding endeavors of my life.

Shifting Gears

Driven by a strong desire to delve deeper into web technology, I realized I had become too comfortable in my current role, working as a Teacher. In October 2020, I made the difficult decision to leave my teaching position and venture into the realm of Web Technologies. This decision did not come easily, as I had no alternate source of income and my savings were limited, only sufficient to last a few months. For the next three months, I found myself unemployed, but I utilized this time to extensively explore web technology, with a particular focus on WordPress.

Despite grappling with imposter syndrome at the time, I was completely unaware of its impact on me.

What I failed to realize then was that all I needed was a little push—a smidgen of encouragement—to help me advance with the skills and knowledge I possessed. I am immensely grateful to Topher DeRosia for providing me with that much-needed push. His encouragement was priceless, and it spurred me to send my resume to three different WordPress-related companies. To my delight and relief, I received a response from one of them.

From those early days in the cyber café to securing a position at rtCamp, my journey has been anything but ordinary. In light of my experiences and the passion I developed from my early encounters with technology, I secured a position as a WordPress developer at rtCamp in February 2021. This was a significant milestone for me, especially recalling my days without a computer in my village and the hours spent in cyber cafes learning the complexities of the digital world. The journey to this point was challenging, especially since I navigated it largely on my own, without a mentor or assistance from anyone./

Because Of WordPress…

Now, working full-time with WordPress, not only am I able to comfortably cover my bills, but I can also provide for my family.

I’m delighted to share that he has successfully recuperated and no longer requires medication.

Throughout this path, I’ve faced countless challenges, sleepless nights, and stress. Yet, one truth remains clear: moving forward, no matter the obstacle. Failures are just milestones, not endpoints. With perseverance, success is not just a destination but a beautiful journey. If you’re facing doubts about your abilities, remember, we all start somewhere. It’s the perseverance that counts.

WooCommerce is rebranding to “Woo,” a shorter, more playful version of the company name that many customers are already using. Automattic acquired WooCommerce in 2015, along with WooThemes. The open source commerce platform now powers more than 4.4 million live websites, including 33% of the top 1 million online stores.

The rebranding extends to the Woo Marketplace, WooExperts program, and all other aspects of the Woo experience. It also includes a migration of WooCommerce.com to the woo.com domain.

“‘Woo’ is how many loyal customers have referred to us for years. And now we’re leaning into that name for our company and brand,” Woo VP of Creative and Communications David Callaway said. “It’s a fun, punchy name that shows how excited we are to empower success for merchants and developers. Switching to Woo.com is part of this larger strategy.

“The move to Woo also allows us to standardize and streamline the names of our products and services. For example, we recently renamed WooCommerce Payments to WooPayments, and we’re gradually changing other product names to support this simplified naming system and better connect our core software, extensions, and programs.”

Callaway also noted that while Woo is how they refer to the brand and company, WooCommerce is the open-source e-commerce platform for WordPress, Woo’s core product.

Woo Express is another recently launched product that already bears the shorter name. During the 2023 State of the Woo, delivered at WooSesh, the team highlighted a few milestones for Woo Express, the company’s all-in-one Woo plan hosted on WordPress.com’s infrastructure. It launched in 2023 as what the team described as “Woo’s biggest bet ever.” Free trials began in April 2023 and by July 2023, Woo Express had more than 1,000 customers. It features a new onboarding flow and store personlization experience for merchants, with a setup guide and recommendation engine powered by an AI-driven assistant.

Woo customers will not be affected by the name change, although merchants may see a note about it in their dashboard or emails. No action is required from store owners.

Inside Woo. Today the WooCommerce site becomes Woo.com as a strategic part of their branding and product line.

Day one started with State of the Woo, conversations on open source and hosting, scalable ecommerce and website security.

Munich-based digital agency owner Hendrik Luehrsen has been tracking the usage of themes with the FSE tag (block themes) using a spreadsheet that pulls in data from the WordPress.org API. Wrangling the data in a spreadsheet became too cumbersome, so Luehrsen launched WP Data Dashboard over the weekend as a “centralized hub for exploring, analyzing, and visualizing data across the WordPress landscape.”

The new website is currently tracking 6,017 themes hosted on WordPress.org with 250 snapshots. It offers stats and data-based insights for those interested in getting a bird’s-eye view on themes hosted in the official directory.

“Right now, the WP Data Dashboard has one main function: It crawls the WordPress Theme Repo (API) and crunches the numbers to identify trends,” Luehrsen said. “With the data stored in my own database, I can analyze and combine it in exciting new ways.”

WP Data Dashboard has two unique stats that are interpretations of the data available. The first is a “Usage Score,” which is calculated based on a theme’s active installs vs. total downloads:

The second unique stat is a “Diversity Score,” which compares the downloads of a single theme author to the overall theme directory (or a tag) and scales that value from 0 to 100:

The Usage Scores can be seen on the List page, which is an index of all the themes, as well as on the Tag pages.

The Diversity Score is only displayed on the Stats page as a percentage representing the entire WordPress.org ecosystem. The Diversity score goes up when the stats are calculated without the default themes, which get a large number of downloads from the same “WordPress.org” author every year.

In a thread on X, Luehrsen highlighted a few data points he has extracted so far from the dashboard.

“Fun fact: Did you know that the most downloaded themes ever are Twenty Seventeen, Twenty Fifteen, and Astra?” he said. “Each has crossed over 10 million downloads! But only Astra managed to retain its users and remains today as one of the most widely used themes.

“What’s somewhat surprising is the decline in downloads for the newer default themes. While Twenty-Twenty garnered over 8 million downloads, Twenty Twenty-One managed only 6 million, and Twenty Twenty-Two a mere 3 million.”

This may be related to the slow adoption of block themes, which still appears to be stagnating at the end of October. The number of block theme active installs declined from August to September, but is now inching its way back up to previous numbers.

“Did you know that only 2% of overall theme downloads come from themes tagged as ‘Full Site Editing‘?” Luehrsen said. “Given that they’re relatively new, it’s not too surprising!”

When asked if he has considered trying to include numbers for themes like Elementor and Divi, which make up a large segment of the commercial theme market, Luehrsen said he would like to include external data but the compatibility of that data would be very limited, which in turn limits comparability with WordPress.org-hosted themes.

The WP Data Dashboard is a useful way to track trends in WordPress.org themes over time, and the site appears primed to add data for plugins at a future date. It would be even more helpful if Luehrsen could make some of the calculated data available for visitors at a glance, such as 2% of overall theme downloads coming from Full Site Editing tagged themes. There are a lot of ways this data could be visualized with graphs and charts in the future, as the database adds more information over time.

The project is hosted on GitHub under a GPL license, so anyone can dig deeper into the code to see how it works or submit contributions to extend its capabilities.

Join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy as she looks at a recent WordPress success story, the clean energy solution Little Sun, and learns about their WordPress story.

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Show Notes

Transcript

[00:00:00] Josepha: Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing. The podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.

[00:00:40] Josepha: Today, I’ve got a special guest with me. I have here a couple of folks from Little Sun, a nonprofit organization that recently moved its entire online presence to WordPress. And we’re talking everything from their mission statement and donations all the way to their blog and shop.

[00:01:01] Josepha: We have with us Little Sun today. Can you start by introducing yourselves and your organization? Just tell us a little bit about what you all do.

[00:01:08] Romane: Hi, my name is Romane Guégan. I’m a Senior Press and Communications Manager at Little Sun.

[00:01:14] Ashley: And I am Ashley Mrozek. I’m the Senior Digital Manager.

[00:01:17] Josepha: So what does Little Sun do for the folks who are listening and maybe don’t know about it yet?

[00:01:22] Romane: Little Sun brings full power and light to communities that live off the grid, with the focus on sub-Saharan Africa because most of the people who lack access to electricity and need them. And we also inspire people to take climate action globally.

[00:01:39] Ashley: So access to solar energy helps kids who don’t have electricity and study at night. They can complete their homework at night. If their schools are in a more rural area, they will have a light to kind of guide them back home.

We also work on a lot of electric vocation projects and hospitals. So we’re, we’re kind of supporting labors that are, are taking place in the evening, after the sun goes down, among other things.

[00:02:07] Josepha: Yeah. It’s, I, I think that that is one of the things that folks, probably most of my listeners, probably take for granted, like the easy access to light. And as we all know, the sun is around a lot. And so that is one of our most readily available resources other than potentially wind power. But I think that that is a great mission. And I really think that that’s wonderful work that y’all are doing.

So, is there a particular reason that you focus on sub-Saharan Africa? Is that where you find a majority of people who don’t have access to that kind of resource are?

[00:02:43] Romane: Yeah. 70% of those people actually need in sub-Saharan Africa, where solar is actually a viable source of energy. Actually, it’s only 1% of solar, of the solar capital of the generation when we actually deliver solar energy there because there is so much potential.

[00:03:04] Josepha: That’s amazing. So you said that you all were funded in 2012. I imagine that your business has evolved over time. So, obviously, you all are WordPress users. That’s why we have you here with us today. But before we get into the questions about WordPress itself. Why don’t you tell us a bit about how your business needs evolved over time and how you wound up needing a solution that did use WordPress?

[00:03:31] Ashley: So I would say our focus and kind of the different initiatives that we’ve taken on since 2012 have shifted a lot based on various reasons, where our donors are, where we’ve kind of found the most need, and where we can be the most impactful.

And I think as we go into those new geographies, our online presence has become more and more important.

[00:03:55] Josepha: So, before you all switched to WordPress, I understand that you had several sites that you had to merge into one. And so I assume that as you evolved the business and your focus has changed, you realized you needed something a bit more streamlined. So, how was that transition, that migration from a lot of different sites to one big site?

[00:04:17] Romane: Yeah, because we started as a global project. And then, with the time, we evolved, actually also getting new donations. And in the past, we used to have one website where we have our webshop and our mission, our vision, all of our project descriptions.

But then we had another website only for the foundation. And then you had another foundation in the U.S. So it was the question, okay, how do we put everything together? So we actually switched from littlesun.com to littlesun.org with WordPress, and it was amazing to see how we managed with the team to create an ecosystem approach, including impact, but also sales, and fundraising.

[00:05:02] Josepha: That was a big footprint that you all had, and you kind of consolidated it into one. And for all of our folks listening on the podcast, I’m going to include some links, not only to their site but then also to a few other things that we’ve mentioned in here today. So, since you made that change, how has it, how has that impacted the way that you all work with your site or with your online presence?

[00:05:27] Ashley: Yeah, I think using WordPress and having access to WordPress has been hugely valuable for us. We’re a small team, we’re a nonprofit, so it is pretty scrappy. Everyone is kind of doing a lot of different things. We don’t have a dedicated development team. And so being able to easily customize our pages and create new landing pages or make adjustments on the site without that development help has been valuable.

[00:05:55] Josepha: Yeah, so you don’t have a developer team now. Did you have a developer team when you had all the sites?

[00:06:03] Josepha: Okay, yeah. I am also not a developer, for what it’s worth, and have been working with nonprofits for a while. And I understand that problem where you have all these things you need to do and want to do, but there are also things you absolutely have to focus on in order to make your mission possible and your vision come true.

[00:06:23] Ashley: Yeah, and I think, I think WordPress has given us a lot more, like a lot more flexibility to kind of produce new content quickly. And because of that, it’s just been a lot more efficient, too, for us, you know.

[00:06:38] Josepha: And you all are using Blocks? Are you, like, the best Block builders?

[00:06:43] Josepha: Blocks are a fairly new innovation for the history of WordPress. WordPress has been around for 20 years, so we’re a nice, mature project. And we’ve really only had blocks as a functional part of the CMS for probably the last five or so. We’ve been working on the project a little bit longer. And it has been fascinating to me, like, in my own work that I have done with WordPress, kind of outside of my work with the project, to see, like, how much autonomy you get to have back as somebody who is not a developer, maybe isn’t a designer, but you do know exactly what you need to have on your site today, right?

And having to stop and find a freelancer or stop and find some set of developers who can make those changes. For me, when I was specifically working on nonprofit stuff. That was always kind of a moment where I was like, well, I guess I’ll just go to Facebook and put that on there or something because I was faster than trying to find someone to come help you. And so, I’m so glad you love the block.

[00:07:50] Josepha: Also, your site is adorable, and your brand is adorable, in case no one’s mentioned that lately. Super cute. Super cute.

[00:07:58] Josepha: So, we’ve talked about how you kind of took a bunch of stuff and made it into one big thing and how that’s been easier for you all to manage it. But from the standpoint of just, like, somebody who’s running a nonprofit, someone who’s running an organization, how has that transition been for your team? I know you said you don’t have a huge team, but was the move toward WordPress a net benefit over time, or was it immediately beneficial? Like, how has that been for your team?

[00:08:27] Romane: So what’s interesting actually is that we have a team that is spread also all over the world. And so we have teams in Berlin and in U.S., and New York. In Zambia, too. What was really interesting was how people identify to the new website because now we have to really think, okay, what is the content we want people to see, but also we want our critics to see. And so it kind of unified all of our content at Little Sun. And it was much more like much easier to understand afterwards.

[00:09:04] Romane: And it was because we also work at the intersection of creative communications, impacts, fundraising, technology, and to be able to put everything and have it on the front. And then have the stories to tell the stories from sub-Saharan Africa, from universities who got either a Little Sun lamps or solar systems, and then we have the donation page, so basically everything could be integrated in a super easy way, and it could target different audiences easily, either it’s someone who wants to partner with us, or a donor, or just someone who wants to be part of our solar training.

[00:09:46] Josepha: Yeah, and I mean, I think that no one will be surprised to hear that if you have multiple things that you have to get everybody to, it really increases the amount of marketing that you have to accomplish, rather than having one place for everyone to go too, and they can see everything that they might want once they arrive. So, that’s wonderful.

[00:10:06] Ashley: I think I was just going to say, or kind of echo what Romane said about the fact that we have so many different audiences, we have partners, we have donors, we have people who are just coming to learn about solar energy, or who are interested in purchasing a lamp. I think prior to this, it was a little bit confusing for those different audiences to kind of navigate to where they were intended to go to on the site, and now it’s much more cohesive. And we often hear that from people where it’s like, it’s quite easy to, to kind to find what they need to find on the site.

[00:10:39] Josepha: I define the WordPress community as anyone who is using WordPress, regardless of whether they know it or not. And so you all, in my mind, are part of the WordPress Community. And I just wondered if being part of that community has changed your approach to the way that you manage your content online or the way that you have chosen work with your business as like an online entity that also does on-the-ground, in-person thing?

[00:11:06] Ashley: I think definitely. I think we’re kind of going back to what I said before. I think we’re much more efficient now. I think in the past, it’s the idea of, like, well, getting this web page live or publishing this is going to be, you know, we have to think about a huge timeline, that’s, is going to require a lot of resourcing, a lot of different types of expertise and people, and everything now feels like something that we can, we can launch pretty immediately, which is really wonderful too.

I would also say just like being a part of the WordPress community too. It’s the sort of support that we’ve gotten from your team. It’s always really tailored. And I think as a nonprofit working with a, like, a much bigger business, you can be apprehensive sometimes, feeling like you won’t really get that personalized support.

And I think that’s something that’s been so nice with WordPress. Is really feeling like the people we’re working with are understanding our business and taking the time to understand our needs. And I think that makes us think differently about our online presence as well because then we feel like we have that additional support, which is great.

[00:12:12] Josepha: I’m always a fan of hearing that people who are passionate about WordPress are also passionate about helping others with WordPress. That’s one of my favorite things about us. That’s not true. I have like 25 favorite things about us. And so I need to stop saying that I have one favorite, but I never will.

Okay, well, do you all have any last thoughts that you just want to share with me or podcast listeners that we have?

[00:12:36] Ashley: Yeah, I think the, the plugins and integrations have been really useful for us. I think it can be really intimidating to bring on, like, a new tech solution or tool and feel like everything that you are already working with or have is going to become outdated or obsolete in some way. And I think it’s just been really nice to work with WordPress and have all of those transitions be really seamless for everything to connect really well. Yeah, I think that’s been. That’s hugely helpful too.

[00:13:07] Josepha: So, was that part of the decision-making process? Like, do I know that this software will be around in the future so that you’re making an investment in the site now and know that it’s going to hang around now you can find people help? Like, was that part of the decision-making process?

[00:13:21] Ashley: I think so. I mean, I guess I wasn’t completely around during the time, but I would say, like, that’s definitely something that we’re considering in any kind of tech that we’re thinking about is it can require so much work to, to kind of bring something on with such a small team. So we want to ensure that, yeah, it’s going to last, it has longevity, and it’s going to work with the tools that we already have. So I think all of that is really important for sure.

[00:13:48] Josepha: Well, thank you both so much for joining me. Like I said, we’ll have a link to littlesun.org in the notes so that you all can learn more about their project and see their beautiful site with their beautiful little solar sunflowers.

[00:14:11] Josepha: What a wonderful organization. I’m so glad that they found WordPress and that it works for them. Let’s continue our tour today with the small list of big things.

Item number one, it’s time to save the date: December 11th, 2023, for this year’s State of the Word. State of the Word is the annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress Project co-founder Matt Mullenweg. Every year, the event shares reflections on the project’s progress and aspirations for the future of open source. And so, if that is something that you like to tune into, December 11th is your day.

Second thing on our list is that we are celebrating our 10,000th photo submission. So, on October 11th, the 10,000th photo was approved. The Photo Team is one of the newest ways to contribute to the WordPress open source project, and it feeds all of those photos into Openverse as well.

The third thing on our list today is that I want to tell you about a community team training module that just came out. It’s specifically about the Translate Live tool, and it is ideal for presenting at your local meetups to engage and onboard new translators for your native language. If you’re organizing a WordCamp, consider introducing this tool during your Contributor Day. I will leave a link for this in the show notes so that it is easy to find.

And item number four, the journey to update WordPress.org, continues with the launch of a new Showcase design. The Showcase is a natural starting point for a lot of visitors who are on WordPress.org. It inspires creativity and also demonstrates what’s possible with WordPress. So, stop on by there, it’s WordPress.org/showcase, and give it a bit of a look.

[00:15:58] Josepha: And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. And don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever a new episode drops. And if you like what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you had questions about what you heard today, you can share those with me at wprebriefing@WordPress.org.

I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

Delivering on an highly-requested feature, Gutenberg contributors have made it possible to rename almost any block in the List View. Version 16.9 was released this week with the new feature, which builds on Gutenberg 16.7‘s introduction of the ability to rename Group blocks.

It works in a similar way to naming Photoshop layers. Users can now open the list view, click on the ellipsis menu, select “Rename,” and enter a custom name.

“Allowing users to distinguish between blocks in the List View is becoming increasingly important as the scope of the Site Editor grows,” Automattic-sponsored contributor Dave Smith said in the original ticket proposing the feature for the Group block. “Given that all blocks are currently labelled by the block name (e.g. Group) it can be difficult to distinguish between them. This is especially important if your Groups represent distinct ‘sections’ of a given page/template.”

More renaming capabilities have been added in 16.9, including the ability to duplicate and rename patterns, as well as pattern categories.

This release introduces new experimental form and inputs blocks to allow building basic forms. It’s a feature that has taken many by surprise, as few would have predicted WordPress core would be adding form building. A very early version is available under Gutenberg > Experiments, under the “Form and input blocks” experiment setting.

“Why has there been no proactive outreach to the many developers of longstanding WordPress form solutions currently used by millions and millions of WordPress sites?” Gravity Forms co-founder Carl Hancock commented on the PR.

“It seems like proactive outreach to people who are experts in this space and who could do the most to help drive adoption (beyond comments/search/etc.) would have been a good thing. On many levels. Trying to get them on board with contributing, learning from their shared historical knowledge, and even more important of all… building on top of it and adopting it instead of introducing a point of more fragmentation.”

The forms feature is still in the very early stages of experimentation, and more information may be published to the November edition of “What’s New For Developers?“

Check out the release post for Gutenberg 16.9 to see the full changelog and more details on bug fixes and enhancements to performance, tooling, documentation, code quality, and accessibility.

The upcoming 6.4 release, expected on November 7, will disable attachment pages for new installations. Up until now, WordPress automatically created attachment pages when users upload a file through the media upload system. It has been treated as a special post type that holds information about the file and each attachment is accessible under its own URL. SEO plugins have been redirecting attachment pages for years, as they rarely have any significant purpose.

“Until WordPress 6.4 was released, WordPress created attachment pages by default for every attachment uploaded,” WordPress contributor Joost de Valk said in the dev note for this change. “On the vast majority of sites, these attachment pages don’t add any meaningful information. They do, however, exist, get indexed by search engines, and sometimes even rank in search results, leading to bad results for users and site owners.”

There will be no changes to existing sites. They will continue to work as they always have, but new sites will have their attachment pages redirected to the attachment URL. Site admins who want to enable or disable attachment pages can use the new wp_attachment_pages_enabled database option to control attachment pages’ behavior.

There is no interface for changing whether a site disables attachment pages, which was somewhat controversial in the comments on the Trac ticket and the dev note.

“In light of the WordPress mantra ‘decisions, not options,’ we’ve decided against making a setting for this,” de Valk said.

WordPress plugin developer Sybre Waaijer mades a case for giving users an option with an interface for toggling it on or off:

While an interface isn’t in the cards for WordPress 6.4, and may never be back on the table for consideration, contributors are discussing the possibility of putting this in a core plugin.

“Should we not have a core plugin for re-enabling attachment pages on new sites?” Automattic-sponsored contributor Justin Tadlock said. “If there’s not going to be a UI for this, then a plugin that’s not buried in a Trac ticket would be ideal.”

de Valk agreed this would be a good idea to have a plugin that simply adds a setting to the Options -> Media page. Users likely will not understand the purpose of attachment pages unless they are looking to enable them for a specific, niche use case. A plugin like this would be useful for those who are not able to write the code to change attachment pages’ behavior, as described in the dev note.

I have had many people in the WordPress and WooCommerce space ask me why I use and like LinkedIn. Here is my answer, finally.

TaxoPress, a plugin that allows users to create and manage Tags, Categories, and taxonomy terms, has joined a growing number of WordPress products using AI to innovate and enhance user experience. The latest release adds support for OpenAI and IBM Watson to auto-detect the best taxonomy terms for content.

“Honestly, I’m amazed how good these services are,” TaxoPress founder Steve Burge said. “For a long time, TaxoPress supported Dandelion and also LSEG / Refinitiv. These services are from a previous generation of AI tools. They could scan your content and suggest taxonomy terms. They support a couple of languages and have some options.

“In comparison, I’m blown away with the potential of these new services, particularly OpenAI.”

This first version of TaxoPress AI also introduces an updated metabox on the post editing screen with options to manage post terms, suggest existing terms, and connect to external AI services for scanning content and suggesting terms. The AI features are only available in TaxoPress Pro.

AI-based auto-tagging is an exciting new way to enhance an otherwise conventional, established utility plugin. It introduces a bit of magic that produces better results with a far wider reach into the world’s languages.

Burge said TaxoPress will soon be adding more AI features for categorizing WordPress content and will focus on enabling more tools that are available through OpenAI and IBM Watson.

From political science to tech, Rytis Lauris, co-founder of Omnisend takes us on his product and WordPress journey.

In an effort to keep the WordPress community up to date, this post provides an update on the PHP compatibility of the upcoming WordPress 6.4 release scheduled for November 7, 2023.

Recommended PHP version for WordPress 6.4

It’s recommended to use PHP 8.1 or 8.2 with this upcoming release. Please refer to the Hosting page for more detailed information, including a few known issues.

Why does compatibility matter?

PHP is a programming language on which the WordPress code is based. This language runs on the server, and it is critical to keep it updated for security and functionality. Various teams within the WordPress open source project work to both test and fix any issues with new PHP versions so you can update with confidence that the WordPress core software is compatible.

The 6.4 Field Guide is now published with technical notes. It’s a lengthy document that collates all the dev notes for important changes that developers will want to review. A few examples include the following:

In addition to these important updates to core, WordPress 6.4 will roll six Gutenberg releases into the core – 16.2, 16.3, 16.4, 16.5, 16.6, 16.7.

The emails have gone out to extension developers, who are encouraged to test against 6.4 and update the current “Tested up to” values for each extension.

One of the easiest ways to test the upcoming release is by using Playground: https://playground.wordpress.net/?wp=beta. The Playground environment can be further customized for different storage types, PHP versions, and the WordPress version.

A comprehensive 6.4 testing guide has been published with video demonstrations of how each of the key new features should behave. This makes it easy for testers to know if something is not working the way it should.

WordPress 6.4 is now under two weeks away from its scheduled release day of November 7, 2023.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

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Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the recent merger of 10up and Fueled, as well as some thoughts on how WordPress will adapt with AI.

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If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcasts players.

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If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.

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So on the podcast today we have Jake Goldman. Jake is the president and founder of 10up, a digital agency that builds websites and tools for content creators, leveraging open platforms like WordPress.

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We start the conversation with an exploration of the recent merger with 10up, Fueled and Insignia. For many years 10up has been one of the leading enterprise WordPress agencies. With a roster of well-known clients, Jake has grown the company from himself to hundreds of employees.

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Whilst the journey has been exciting and challenging, Jake talks about some of the areas in which 10up has not been able to compete, and how the merger with Fueled will enable them to position themselves for projects which used to be out of reach. Fueled brings their experience of crafting mobile experiences, and Insignia brings their financial expertise, as well as the industry connections they have built up.

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Jake shares how this new venture will continue to leverage WordPress as their CMS of choice. These new partners understand and support 10up’s commitments to contributing to WordPress. There are no plans to immediately alter the structure of either 10up or Fueled. It’s more about building an understanding of the capabilities of each partner, working towards a future in which the company grows into one entity over time.

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We talk about the intentional pursuit of potential partners, and Jake reflects on the importance of cultural alignment and connections. He shares how his prior experience has shaped both his personal journey as a leader, and the success of 10up. And we explore the milestones, challenges, and key moments that have brought them to where they are today.

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Jake expresses his view that these tools are to be seen as accelerants, complementing human website development, rather than replacing it, particularly at the enterprise level. We delve into 10up’s ongoing exploration and experimentation with AI, discussing some of the tools they have freely released.

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If you’re interested in how enterprise agencies grow or the future of AI with WordPress, this episode is for you.

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If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

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And so, without further delay, I bring you Jake Goldman.

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I am joined on the podcast today by Jake Goldman. Hello Jake.

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[00:04:31] Jake Goldman: Hey!

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[00:04:32] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you on the podcast today. Really appreciate you joining us. Jake is joining us from 10up.

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10up very recently had some really quite seismic news. In the WordPress community 10up is one of those companies that you have probably heard of. They’re an enterprise level agency, they deal with some of the largest projects in the WordPress space, and they had some news around a merger. So we’ll get into that in a little bit and we’ll also get into some AI topics probably towards the end.

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Prior to that though Jake, I’ve just given a little bit of an introduction about where you work, but I’m curious about your backstory, particularly as regards WordPress, this is after all a WordPress podcast. So would you mind just giving us a little bit of your backstory. Where you fit into the WordPress ecosystem? What is the company that you work for and how did you set that up?

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[00:05:22] Jake Goldman: Sure. I’ll see if I can do this concisely. I feel like there’s so much to the backstory. 10up today is a shop that I have run for twelve and a half years now, as we’ll talk about. Part of a larger organisation. We are a web agency and we have been very proudly advocates of open source, open technologies, WordPress is our tool of choice. We also very much believe apropos of open source and giving back to the web, and helping continue to make the web an open platform where people, you know don’t have to pay huge licensing fees to be involved, be able to make websites, be able to learn new technologies and new skills.

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And we very much believe that as we have climbed up that ladder of an open web that we need to keep that ladder extended to the next generation. So we are also very large contributors to the project, we donate thousands of hours every year to open source. A large part of that goes to WordPress Core. Goes to a rich ecosystem of extensions that we contribute, that we think solve some hard problems, particularly in the enterprise, the kind of customers that we serve.

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Before this new event, just as 10up we’ve been about 300 people. That is a company that has grown organically from 2011 when we were founded, with just me writing code and doing a little bit of UX, and doing all the business side of things and built it sort of brick by brick.

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I got into WordPress circa 2007, 2008. I was working at a shop as many were at the time focused on commercial CMSs and closed platforms. We kind of wanted to diversify, saw the writing on the wall. Started exploring with different popular open platforms at the time that was WordPress. One of the partners in that company was focused on Drupal.

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I saw a lot of potential in that platform that came, I thought, to pass over the next few years, and when it was time for me to go out on my own and start my own business, I was pretty determined that if I believed in an open web and wanted to see open technology thrive, that WordPress was a good horse to bet on. And so started 10up. Determined to become one of those agencies of record in the space. I guess the rest is history.

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[00:07:02] Nathan Wrigley: Did you have any intuition back then that WordPress was, you spoke about it in terms of it being you know a good horse to back. Did you have any intuition that it was the horse to back? Or would you have been prepared at any moment to swap horses mid race you know had Drupal pushed ahead? Because I had all sorts of intuitions, many of them which turned out to be completely wrong in terms of Drupal and other open source platforms.

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And eventually after WordPress became successful, I joined that ecosystem. But it sounds like you made a bit of a serendipitous choice. It was a bit of good luck possibly. And I wonder what your thoughts are around that.

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[00:07:38] Jake Goldman: Yeah I mean there’s always an element of luck. I could have chosen never to look at WordPress, right? Or taken it seriously as a platform. I certainly thought I saw potential. I mean, you work in web from 1996 to 2007, you’ve tried and dabbled in lots of different technologies. I think it was, maybe this is the older man in me speaking now, but I think it was easier at the time to move between different technologies. There wasn’t so much friction trying new things, trying new platforms.

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As somebody that’s very, that likes engineering, and likes tech, and likes the geeky side but also has a strong appreciation for user interface and making things easy and putting myself in the shoes of people that are actually just trying to publish something on a website. Actually trying to manage content, always wanting throughout my entire time in web to be able to like hand off a website, maintain it, but be able to hand off and have a delightful experience for those website owners to keep updating their website and managing the content on their website.

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It was very clear to me even 2008, 2009, I think it was around the time of the first big UI change in WordPress, you know the menu on the left and still elements of that echos of that design today in WordPress. It was very clear to me that in terms of platforms that we’re creating really focused on, what is that website owner, what is that content publisher experience that WordPress was, I thought, just running circles around the other platforms?

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So I saw a lot of potential. I was experimenting with even doing things that were custom post type like before there was really custom post types in core, and saw where the core project was heading in terms of adding more taxonomy support, adding more different content types and some of those fundamentals of a bigger CMS.

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So I guess a bit lucky that I happened to be stumbling and playing and looking closer at the platform at the time, but I guess the short answer is yeah, I mean it was very palpable to my instincts that this thing was going to go places.

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[00:09:11] Nathan Wrigley: If you were to look back over the time since 2011, that number of years, the ground will be littered with people who tried to do what you did, but didn’t quite make it. You know they endeavored to have an enterprise level agency, they wished to grow their agency. But for some people clearly that worked, you being one of them. For other people, perhaps it didn’t work out.

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And I’m just wondering if you’ve got any intuitions as to what the key moments were in those years. If you look back and think, okay that was the moment, that was another moment, that was a third moment. What were the pivotal bits, the decisions that you made, the projects that you took up, which allowed you to become the sort of force that you are now?

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[00:09:48] Jake Goldman: It’s a great question and, you know, I’ll be earnest, I never really look at the sort of long journey and arc as, it’s nice to think of it as like there was this moment and everything changed. But it wasn’t really like that. It was a brick by brick, year over year kind of effort. I mean when I look back at moments that I could call out, you know certainly when starting the company, I’m not sure if this is a moment so much as a story you know sort of a narrative about, I think why we were able to be successful.

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But I’ve always emphasised that the trick to, I think, 10up’s success is that I did not descend out of the sky one day out of college and say I’m a business owner. Before I started 10up I spent over a decade working for other people, doing side consulting. There was a whole story before 10up started which was time in the industry, building connections, building a network, investing in relationships, learning from mentors about how to think about a budget, and a P and L, and what’s really involved in hiring people. Having the joy of hiring someone great and the torture of having to let people go before I ever started the company. Knowing how to put numbers together, had fantastic mentors.

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If you want the honest answer, the real story of our success is, it was everything that happened before starting 10up. It was the relationships I was able to bring into that company, clients like side consulting projects I had been doing on the side for over a decade that I was able to bring in to the company.

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I think there’s a lot of people today that sort of drop out of the sky and say you know my role in life is to be an entrepreneur and day one I’m starting a company and I just, I can’t imagine I would have been nearly as successful, 10up would have been nearly as successful as it was if I didn’t have that whole backstory.

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I can point to some other moments, you know winning in the first year. Getting introductions vis-à-vis those connections to customers like TechCrunch that we still work with to this day, on their site that have obviously become very powerful items in your portfolio. I can point to bringing on strong leaders including our CEO who joined us in 2014, still with us today, John Eckman.

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I think one other thing that has made 10up different than some companies in the space is I like to believe it is not a company that revolves around its founder’s ego. That I’ve always tried to build it with a mindset of, I want this thing to be much more than Jake Goldman. I want the brand to be 10up not Jake’s company. I could ramble on but I think, that’s probably what I would leave you with.

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[00:11:51] Nathan Wrigley: Well thank you. The thing that we’re going to talk about from now is the joining of forces between 10up and a company which in the WordPress space maybe people haven’t heard about, and that is Fueled. We’ll talk about a piece which went on the 10up blog, I will link to it in the show notes. It’s called Fueled Up, 10up joins forces with Fueled Digital Media. And so that’s the direction of travel for the majority of the rest of the podcast.

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But I’m just wondering, in that journey, was the endeavor always growth? Grow, grow, grow, make the agency bigger. And if that was the case, what kind of changed your, direction? Because it seems like you had a bit of an epiphany earlier in the year of 2023. The article paints a picture that you were working with Fueled and then just have this sudden realisation, actually do you know what they are like us. They do something different but their alignment, the sort of direction of travel, their ethics, and all of that seems to match very well.

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And then all of a sudden, well I say sudden, probably months and months in the making, you announced that you’ve joined forces. So I just wonder, what changed about the company that suddenly made you think let’s do something different, let’s join with some other company?

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[00:12:55] Jake Goldman: It’s a fantastic question and the reality is, I’ve written about this a little bit online, like my prior story. It was not a wake up one morning, my you know light bulb went off and the next day we closed the transaction kind of a thing. The reality is, I think we have to go all the way back to saying like, per my last remarks, I have always seen 10up as something that is, I want it to be much more than Jake Goldman Inc. That was always my vision.

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If you think of me as an engineer at heart, I always sort of believe like the best thing you engineer is a thing that continues to live on and be used well beyond the time you spend on it, well beyond your focus on that project. And I’ve always felt the same way about a company, like the perfect business, the ideal company, the ideal team that you build.

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There’s a world where you can someday step back and not be worried if I’m not in the room that this thing doesn’t keep succeeding, this team doesn’t keep thriving. That’s always been on my mind. It was on my mind when I think I surprised a lot of people, again, going all the way back to 2014, and hired a CEO that was not me into the company to help us build it. It’s always been on my mind as I built out different divisions and empowered strong leaders within the business.

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I think there was a moment for me in the, you know the first few years of the 2020s, to me sort of peaking in 2022. Not sure intentionally but probably not accidentally after probably two or three of the most difficult and challenging years to be a business leader probably weighing on my mind as well. Any business leader who does not tell you there was a certain fatigue in 2020, 2021, 2022 is probably not being honest with you.

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At the same time, more consciously I just felt like look, we’re about to break through $40 million in revenue, we think by the end of this year. We think we’re on a trajectory for 300 people at this company. I have been the overwhelming owner of the business, decision maker for you know, at that point for I guess 11 and a half years. And really felt like as we move forward this company needs to have more governance, a different kind of structure, a different kind of ownership that can A, help keep propelling it forward.

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I’ve never run a company of that scale in size before. I think some of what you have to do to manage and invest in a company of that scale is a little bit different when you start to reach that kind of size. And I frankly want to make sure this company is taken care of in the event that I ever, you know I could get sick, I could get hit by a bus.

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I don’t think the company even as it existed previously, would suddenly just disappear overnight by any means. But there was a certain amount of like legal structure, a certain amount of like ownership management, and share structure. A certain amount of where are the other highly experienced, growing companies of this size kind of leaders and investors that were missing.

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And when I thought about I can go through the effort to do that on my own, think about like employee owned companies or think about how to completely restructure stock and legal formations. To be honest with you, when I started thinking about that, I was struggling to imagine being excited to get out of bed for the next two years focused on like legal apparatus, and being that different kind of owner of that larger company which just. You know so I guess I’m rambling a little bit to say like that mindset that I was in of I think we need something more in terms of governance, ownership, to a degree, diluting the degree to which it sort of sits on my lap as an owner.

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Combine that with my sense that the next phase of growth is, I think, going to come from moving even further up market to being even more of a serious competitor to like the Deloitte Digitals and the Code and Theory’s of the world, the people that are not coming in saying you know we’re great WordPress integrators, or just great website makers but were true full digital experience shops.

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I think those things kind of collided for me in a way that said maybe it’s time to look at M&A. Maybe it’s time to look at who we can join forces with. And I’ll be transparent, we went on a very intentional journey, we had advisors in that process. It was you know help guide me through an exploration of you know who might be the kind of company that you can join forces with. And let’s not just wait for it to fall in my lap, or just go on this blind exercise and all the you know, all my copious spare time of hunting.

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But be intentional about seeking who those partners would be. Spoke to a lot of different companies, had different sort of, I would say suitors, or even offers of which we walked away from. But as we got to know Fueled in particular and then started to do some projects together, and started to understand each other, it felt very clear to me that this was a unique and special fit.

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[00:16:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay so let’s talk a little bit about Fueled. So I’m curious to know, what is it about them that make that fit special? So presumably you went out and I’m obviously going to paraphrase the whole process, but there must’ve been a series of check boxes that needed to be checked. The company needs to behave in this way, it needs to have this, it needs to have this, we need to be going in this direction, whatever it may be.

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I’m just wondering, why was it Fueled as opposed to all the other companies? And you can take that in whichever direction you like. It may have just been personnel, it may have been turnover, it may have been, I don’t know attitude, roster, anything you like.

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[00:17:16] Jake Goldman: Yeah it’s definitely not just a one thing, but I have to say a lot of it sounds very non business like in a sense. But a lot of it was ineffable. A lot of it was just when you go and you meet with these different suitors, or these different potential partners, or companies that you could merge with. And you sit down in the room with them or you have, you know you start with the Zoom chat. I find myself sort of imagining okay, I’m in a boardroom in a hard time or a good time with them, a year from now, two years from now, how does that feel to me?

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It’s a sort of cultural, does this feel natural? Does this feel like somebody that if I had to have hard conversations it wouldn’t be stilted, and more painful than it needs to be? Do I feel like I would be energised and sort of like an extroverted kind of way, like walk out of meetings and planning sessions more excited about what we’re doing, or would I feel a bit tired from that exercise?

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And I’m trying to think how else to express it. It was just like when I sat down with them, when I met with them, when we actually worked on projects together and collaborated. It felt like if I had brought these people to, you know, if I just brought them to my team and said I just hired this person as a new key executive, or a new key director, or leader, everybody would have just said like you know great hire Jake, what an amazing fit for our culture.

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And I think that was extraordinarily important to me. Yes, there were other boxes to check. The financial side of everything had to make sense. The legal apparatus had to make sense. They had to be in a, obviously, you know reasonably healthy condition as a business. There were things I did not want in terms of like kind of companies that I thought could like destroy what’s precious about 10up and its culture.

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I could talk about all of those things, but at the end of the day when sort of settling down on that gut feeling of, is this a company that I want to be with, that I want to work with, that I want to join forces with? It was the checking of the boxes, different kind of skills, different kind of capabilities, all of those things.

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But at the end of the day, a lot of it came down to these are good people that I would enjoy working with. I would look forward to going to a board meeting. I would look forward to going to an exec planning session. They will make me a better leader. They will make my team better. My team will enjoy collaborating with these people in ways that you know going through this journey and talking to so many companies, even before 2020 like we’ve been approached before, and we’ve had conversations with different companies.

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You start to realise how precious that match is. We can all sort of like be in our bubbles. But really when you start to talk to a lot of these different companies and agencies, you really realise pretty quickly that there are a lot of companies, a lot of people who are doing fantastic work, impressive businesses, but just very different kind of mindsets, cultures, communication styles, ways of thinking about the world. So when you find someone that you actually go and sit down in the meeting and it’s like I could hire you, I wish we could do more projects together, that’s something you latch on to.

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[00:19:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah what a great answer. I really enjoyed listening to that. The next thing I want to talk about is, how Fueled overlaps with you? So I’m imagining in my head a Venn diagram of two circles. And in the past, in the WordPress space, we’ve often seen one agency, for want of a better word, consume another agency. And it almost feels like the two circles are now completely overlapping. One is inside the other. So you can no longer see two circles. You just see one slightly bigger circle.

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But it does seem as if with Fueled we’ve got a nicely fitting Venn diagram. There’s Fueled over here, there’s 10up over here, and there’s some elements of overlap but it’s not entire. The two circles are not colliding. And I’m just wondering, what it is that they do? What it is that you do? What’s the differentiators, and what is that lovely sweet spot in the middle where you both overlap?

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[00:20:23] Jake Goldman: So I’ll start with the sweet spot in the middle. The sweet spot in the middle, to be a little highfalutin about it for a second, is like the desire to use technology, to use cutting edge innovative tech to create fantastic experiences for clients in an agency setting. It really is in some sense that crisp and that simple. We are a professional services business. We use online technologies to make great experiences for our customers.

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Now to be a little less flippant and a little bit more specific about it, like where we have skill set overlap. Fundamentals of doing design systems, whether it’s on mobile for a product, whether it’s on a website. Those are not fundamentally different like technical skill sets that you use every single day. There is an overlap and some like you know Next.js, React kind of front end technologies. They do some web applications in addition to mobile. In fact probably a growing part of their business relatively speaking.

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But when you get beyond the sort of like core common technologies and practices you use when you’re a creative agency, and expand out to okay, what do we actually work on day to day? There is a healthy, non overlapping parts of the circles, outside parts of the Venn circles. Which is to say like I would say that they are predominantly focused on what they are good at, what they are known for, what they have repute in, is doing product development in the sense of mobile applications. Some web applications, but not marketing websites and publishing websites. Not CMS driven experiences really. Like applications, you know e commerce kind of functionality. Think of some of the projects they work on where it’s really you know shopping and user intention driven.

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10up is more on the website marketing, web publishing, web content creation. Again, we overlap a little bit, we’ve even done mobile apps in the past, but we are really strong in how to make a great website that can be put in the hands of those site owners, those site publishers with a strong content management system implementation behind it. And a major focus on content together. That’s media and publishing, or corporate newsrooms, or you know content marketing, or just flat out marketing websites and informational websites. When that was not something conversely that Fueled had really focused on or was good at.

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And we both sort of you know looked at those two sides of the Venn diagram and sort of said, I bet we have a bunch of customers who could use the others services. And there’s a bunch of customers out there who don’t want a shop that sort of neatly fits in one bucket and is kind of stretching and reaching to have a compelling story about the other side.

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[00:22:35] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t know exactly what the audience demographic is, but I’m sure there’ll be a lot of people who don’t work in enterprise agency land. And so this conversation is really interesting, and I am wondering if you’ve had to, probably this is the wrong word, but turn down work, or move away from work, or pivot away from work that, you simply as 10up, didn’t feel you would be doing the best job with. But now you feel, okay we can push forward with projects such as this in the future, because now it’s this bigger enterprise, it’s Fueled, it’s 10up, it’s whatever that’s going to be called in the future.

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[00:23:06] Jake Goldman: Oh yeah for certain. I mean literally can think of projects over the last few years where we had great enterprise, large scale, huge spending customers who needed, just to say it plainly, in some cases needed a mobile application built, put out RFPs for that and probably would have, hoping I’m not being hubristic here, probably would have loved to work with us, at least would have taken very seriously a submission from 10up. Where we just felt like we would not meet qualifications, we’re not confident that we could do a good job, in a way that would not diminish our entire relationship with them.

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It’s the more common scenario that I think about is where we are given opportunities to pitch business, we’re given opportunity, we have an introduction, we have a connection, and we just don’t quite compete in the right way in terms of coming across as having a real platform that you would describe as a full digital experience solution.

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While it’s true that we have customers, we have business that I would say has been left on the table because we didn’t have these capabilities. What I’m more focused on is where do we not compete well for opportunities? Where do we not get invited into the room or just not last long in the conversation? Because to overstate melodramatically for a fact, we come across as a WordPress integrator implementation shop, not a full digital experience business.

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[00:24:12] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a third circle in this Venn diagram which we haven’t mentioned so far and it’s a venture capital company called Insignia Capital. I confess I don’t know anything about Insignia Capital. So I’m just wondering, probably fairly quickly, I don’t know if you want to dwell on this, but I’m just wondering if you could explain how that fits in.

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[00:24:29] Jake Goldman: Sure. So at the risk of splitting hairs for your audience they’re a private equity company which is a little bit different from venture capital. Probably not a very material difference for most of the people listening to this but it’s a little bit different. Sort of like, what are the returns they expect? How do they operate? Where do they get their funding? And so forth.

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Still the same principle in terms of, I guess the short version would be that they are the money people. So the way that they fit, to try to make it concise, they joined forces with, made a massive investment in Fueled about one year ago. Which is to say they’re not the full ownership of Fueled. Fueled’s owners still hold a large share of that company, but they have controlling ownership, vis a vis putting a huge investment into Fueled.

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And what Fueled, other than of course some opportunities for some liquidity for their owners wanted out of that, is a real partner who knows how to, from the investor side, has both connections, has both capital, has sort of financial and industry sophistication to help them build a bigger business together.

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So to put it in plain terms, what Insignia wants to do is work with a platform, which for them that was Fueled as the initial partnership, the initial investment. To build a bigger, more valuable company that increases the value of the equity that they have in that business. The way that they do that oftentimes, like the strategy in professional and digital services is you do what’s called add ons.

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So you bring in other companies into the fold, you attach them to that company and you end up with something that is much more valuable for a number of reasons. It’s higher revenue, but it’s also everything I just described about you have a you know, a shop that looks like a full digital services provider with CRM capability and sales force and CMS and mobile apps, is just a more valuable business than one that’s kind of pigeonholed in one of those spots.

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So you can kind of make smart investments with investors that really raise the overall value of the business. Like 10up, I would say Fueled’s ownership really did not have the sort of the sophistication, appetite, capital to do that on their own. Which is why they partnered up with Insignia. Insignia has sort of the financial vehicle, all those things I described earlier in the conversation, where it’s what does it mean to restructure legally 10up to have multiple ownership, and to have shares and to have stock and to have investors with a lot of influence and connections in the space.

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So long story short, they help us restructure to be able to join with Fueled, to be able to make one business out of these two companies. And that happens, in large part, by helping purchase a significant amount of 10up equity, so I am no longer the dominant controlling owner of 10up.

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It’s a little muddy, and I guess like the short version of it is like they are the financial backers for this combined entity. They make it possible to restructure the business and combine into one through capital, and they also bring quite a bit of sophistication around how to build these platforms. They have connections with other companies that can be acquired, they have a lot of connections with very senior, influential people in the decision making space, in the agency space and in the B2B space. So it’s not that they just bring money, they also bring a lot of wisdom about how to build these larger companies as investors, advisors, board members with strong connections.

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[00:27:12] Nathan Wrigley: Now that the ink is dry on the contracts and you’ve had a little bit of water flowing under the bridge, I’m just wondering if you can tell us how 10up particularly has changed? I know that your company is broadly distributed, and I just wondered, what is it that it’s going to look like if we can cast our eyes forward a year into the future? What are you endeavoring to create there? Is the idea that this one entity, everybody will be mixed? It will be a homogenous entity or will we have, broadly speaking, will we still have the WordPress side? What are you planning?

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[00:27:42] Jake Goldman: So the first thing to say is when we get like sort of in the weeds of how it’s going to operate, and a question of like what has changed today. So far that is still a journey of discovery that we are on. That’s not BS, that is authentic. I can speak to what we all sort of I think share as like a heading and vision and ultimate destination, when you talk about the one, two, three years out.

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But we don’t think that means like jumping in and month one, this is not like shifting around 17 different divisions and immediately restructuring in three months. No, we are learning from each other, we are still deep in the process of teams and project management, and design, and growth, and sales, and engineering. Sort of comparing notes, getting to understand each other better, getting more insight into each other’s businesses. Sharing leads, sharing opportunities that we think might be better fit to one team or the other. Sometimes sharing personnel where they’re skillsets overlap and one team or the other could use help.

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But really operating essentially as two, continuing to operate as we did before the merger, as two strong partners with a bunch of research, discovery, integration, exploration going on in the background of the company.

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In terms of where we are headed. Yes, our goal is ultimately not to be like there’s a 10up and there’s a Fueled out there competing in the agency space, and sometimes sharing opportunities. Our ultimate goal is to be a unified business, to have a clear, centralised governance. To be able to go to market as one entity, one brand and sell a story of not two different partners working together, but one fully integrated set of capabilities.

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Now what that looks like again, there’s a lot to color in there that I just don’t have the answer for. I don’t even know that I have an answer, a definitive answer today for where like the brand question would even land. We might find ourselves in 12 months in a model that is still fairly divisional. Which is to say maybe more centralised leadership, centralised operations, more marketing and business development consolidation, but could still sort of like operate with divisions within the business.

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One more focused on applications. One more focused on web and CMS. Could end up with some teams that are totally cross functional. The honest to god answer is that is what we are exploring and trying to work on with our teams and find the best path today. Better right than quickly is our point of view.

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[00:29:35] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of the roster that you’ve currently got. Now you mentioned TechCrunch, and we know that there’s a whole bunch of other enormous companies that you’ve worked with. Did you feel compelled to go out and communicate with them prior to heading down the direction of merging with Fueled? Was there any intuition that maybe your clients would be interested to know that information or potentially you know, nervous to hear that you were doing this, and how would it affect their incredibly important property?

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[00:30:00] Jake Goldman: In a spiritual sense we did not have a lot of concern about it. We thought it would make sense. This is not a case of say it rather crassly like being gobbled up by some international conglomerate that might be controversial to some customers. This was not a case of like changing to foreign ownership of a business.

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It was hard to see how any customers would be anything but sort of happy to hear that we have maybe more sophistication as an entity and a governance and ownership model than, one guy in California owning the business. And pleased to hear that we were expanding our capabilities and could offer more solution and more services to them in the future. So we didn’t really have any sense that like somebody was going to be very upset to hear about this.

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There is a process, there is a certain amount of like notifying, interviewing a small number of customers beforehand that are seen as, maybe riskier because they have strong terms in their contracts around change of ownership. Or just large clients where you know nobody’s going to be happy if for some shocking reason it changed the game afterwards.

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So were some that were informed and brought into the loop, not because we had deep existential concern about it, but because it was a part of a due diligence process. We did speak to a few customers but otherwise the process was largely once we knew this was closing, once we knew this deal was going to get done, it was a rapid notification process. A harried two or three weeks right after the deal closed to make sure that we had a very orderly structure. But a quick way, inform those clients, let them know what that meant for them, deal with any contract language implications or updates. And I have to say I think that went exceptionally smoothly.

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[00:31:24] Nathan Wrigley: Just touching on WordPress, this is after all a WordPress podcast. You have mentioned that your team over the years has contributed really quite large amounts of time and effort and resources to the WordPress project itself. And so I’m just curious as to whether this has changed anything. Or whether you are still everything pointing towards WordPress going to be contributing in the same way. Still using that as the platform of choice for the web side of things, if nothing else.

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[00:31:50] Jake Goldman: So in terms of contribution nothing has changed. My hope is that this will open up added opportunities to contribute, make impact in the space. I think all of our new partners, Fueled, Insignia, understand that you know endemic to our strategy, our culture, our core values is that level of contribution that we make to the space.

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It is, you know even if you don’t believe in it from an ethical sense, from a business sense it has made sense for us and it has helped us grow and it’s helped us acquire business, and helped us have impact, and build culture. So you know there are no plans to change that level of investment that we make.

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In terms of WordPress as a CMS platform, yeah, I mean at the end of the day Fueled and Insignia fully understood that that is our preferred CMS platform, that is the dominant platform that we use. Fully understood that, you know making a bet on 10up was also making a bet on WordPress continuing to be healthy and grow as a platform. The CEO, a lovely fellow named Rameet literally spoke to Matt Mullenweg, as I understand, before I even knew he did about WordPress and about 10up.

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At the end of the day they are looking, you know they chose to merge with us and are looking for us to be the experts in CMS implementation and looking for us to be the experts in how to make these websites and experiences. They don’t have a hubris to think they’re going to come in and tell us, we wanted to merge with you but we think you’ve been doing it wrong the whole time, and you need to change platforms, right? That’s almost silly as a way of thinking about it.

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The short answer is I mean yes, they very much understand what they were buying. They see us as the experts. They look up for us to continue guiding and we continue to see WordPress as our dominant platform that we work with.

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[00:33:14] Nathan Wrigley: I hope you don’t mind me asking you some personal question. I’m just wondering how this is going to affect you? You may decline to answer this question if you wish, and we can just cut it out entirely. But I’m just curious. From a lot of what you said there did seem to be some little bits of, you were intimating that some of these things were going to be wonderful for you as well as the company.

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And I’m just wondering if you’ve had any of those experiences? Has work become more pleasurable? Have you managed to get out of this what you want? Have you managed to make new friendships and new alliances? Is it everything you hoped it would be?

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[00:33:46] Jake Goldman: That’s a big question. I mean there’s two ways to answer that. I think there’s, I’m not trying to dodge, I think there’s a couple of different, two different ways of looking at that question. So the biggest sort of like aspiration that I wanted out of this, which is new partners, having people that are more my equals or even my seniors in this combined business. New advisors, new people that take true, you know in addition to some people on our team, new people, new additions to the team that take real, literal ownership of the business.

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Yes, that is the case and it is welcome for me to have that, those kind of additions. I adore many of my new peers, feel energised when I work with them, when we sit down and plot out the future and work together. All of that is true. Now I think in the moment, four weeks in would I say that my life is now flowers and roses and better and easier? Let’s be earnest here. There’s two things going on at the moment. One is I had the same full time job that I had the week before, with a little less heavy as the head that wears the crown going on. But the same job that I had the month before in terms of like, again, we didn’t snap our fingers and transform the business operations overnight.

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And now I also have this additional responsibility, which I take very seriously of that, playing a key role in facilitating change management and a longer term integration strategy. So if I was being very honest at the moment, my feeling is delight with the partners that we’ve chosen. A little bit of overwhelm and fatigue on like how much more there is to do at the moment. The seriousness with which I take this whole process is not a light burden. Doing big change management across a team of our scale is not a light duty for lack of a better word.

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[00:35:13] Nathan Wrigley: This question would be best answered in a year’s time.

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[00:35:15] Jake Goldman: A hundred percent it would.

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[00:35:17] Nathan Wrigley: Let’s put that topic behind us and just get onto a subject which is completely nothing to do with what we’ve been talking about. Just for a few moments. I’m interested because AI is all the rage, if we were to rewind the clock two years, just two years, I don’t think anybody really in the WordPress space was really talking about AI. Maybe tangentially or some aspirational talk about what it could do.

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And now fast forward to today. We’ve just had a year of utterly seismic change in the capabilities of what AI can do. Most of it disconnected completely with website building. So we’ve got OpenAI and Anthropic and a bunch of other companies launching really seismically amazing products. And I’m just wondering what your thoughts are? What your intuitions are about where this is going to land with website building, with WordPress?

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Now I know that’s an incredibly broad question but I feel that’s all we’ve got at the moment because we don’t have concrete things to pin our discussion to. So I’m just wondering what your general thoughts are.

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[00:36:16] Jake Goldman: Great question. Hang on one second while I type that question into ChatGPT. So we have lots of thoughts and lots of initiatives going on there. I think the first one to call out, and this is a bit of a plug, we have an extension we’ve been working on since before this was cool, since 2018. Back when we called this machine learning more often than artificial intelligence, called Classifai, that’s C L A S S I F A I, because we’re too clever with our puns. So ClassifaiPlugin.com, or just look up Classifai or 10up and AI, it’ll probably come up. I’m sure I’ll put it in show notes or something.

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That plugin has been an experiment staging ground with us for, again, going back to 2018. It is not focused on like how to, I’m not sure I buy that this is the right use case for our kind of customers or you know the dominant part of the market. It does not try to be one of these like, we’re going to build your whole website for you. We’re going to write your story for you and your content. And those are cool demos, there are probably some very small business kind of use cases where you just need kind of like a boilerplate, you know you need to have the brochure. That just has to be a checkbox put next to we have a website.

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But for the kind of market we work with I don’t think those are more than frankly sort of novelty demos at this point in time. That might change as the technology gets better in a year or two, but I don’t think a serious marketer is saying I’m going to write my pages and do my layouts just using AI on its own.

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What we do think is that AI integrated with WordPress, which is what Classifai aims to do, can be extraordinarily powerful in simplifying repetitive tasks, and being an assistant and support to people that are creating and publishing content. So it does things like integrate natively with image generation services. If you want to generate a photo for your site, it will do things like create alt tags, and text descriptions for images, smart crop. It’ll take a pass at making paragraphs shorter or longer, individually in form on your site. It’ll tag images so you can navigate your media library better. It’ll suggest alternative titles you might want to consider.

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So we are very focused in Classifai on what we would describe as extremely pragmatic, realistic, not novelty demo, kind of integration so that WordPress can compete. You know it’s completely open source, free plugin. You have to pay sometimes for the third party services, like the image generation services are mostly licensed. But we don’t make anything off of that, you just buy those services and plug your keys into Classifai settings.

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So this very pragmatic setup where we think that customers, we hope other people using WordPress, can look to Classifai to be a very sort of modern, sort of high end, prosumer enterprise solution that gives an answer to, how do you use WordPress and AI?

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On the technology, engineering side we have a working group. We have ongoing exploration of how do we in a safe way, in a private way, that respects our customers but in a way that keeps us competitive, continues to make sure that we don’t fall behind or suddenly become just wildly out of league and what it costs us to make something. Is experimenting with things like GitHub Copilot and more structured ways we can use that across projects. Experimenting with things like code generation with chat GPT. I don’t think the kind of websites we make are going to be like, build a whole website or 80 percent of the code with those tools.

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I see it as an accelerant, no different than like when we had IDEs or even when we shifted from writing machine code to more natural languages like C and C++ and Swift and all the rest. And I think it’s still early in that exploration. There are certainly signals that there are some kinds of tasks, certain migration tasks, certain repetitive scripting tasks in the shell that you can automate, that you can accelerate.

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And our job right now, and that job’s not done, is to figure out when you have a scale of you know 300 people and 100 or 200 some engineers. How do you create a standard? How do you create a process? What does it mean to create an expectation? Not across one or two people who are smart, curious and hungry to use these, but across an entire team to stay competitive and stay ahead of the curve.

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I wish I could bring you all the answers other than to say like I think that technology will keep getting better. I do think it will help. I am not in the camp of at least for the next you know sort of five years. I am not in the camp of, this is going to replace the need for engineers. You know there are certain leaders in the WordPress space who I think would say like they imagine a few years from now their engineering teams go down from like a hundred to like five.

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Maybe I’ll eat these words. I think it’s a bit silly when we think about the next two, three, four, even five years. I think it’s more like an extreme version of the leap again to like things that would have seemed very foreign 40 years ago, 50 years ago when the industry was frankly smaller, not larger. Where we started to have tools you know template patterns like you know the internet and access to Stack Overflow and good code completion tools.

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These accelerant tools did not obliterate the industry, right? The industry is larger than it’s ever been. Which is to say like a rapid, rapid, huge changes that make engineering and technical tasks easier has never in the history of tech and computing and the web made for a smaller industry. It has always made a larger industry. It just gives people more time to think, to be creative, to make things that are more advanced. It’s raised the bar higher on what people expect in terms of quality and completeness of the experiences they get. I think that is more the world that we live in for the next three, four, five years now.

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[00:40:59] Nathan Wrigley: I’m just wondering if there is some little part of AI which you’ve looked at, and again you know if this encroaches on business processes and things like that, you need not divulge what it is. I just wondered if at the level that you’re working at, if there are certain aspects of AI which you’re thinking, boy that really would save us a lot of time. That really does look like something which we should invest. It sounded like everything that you were developing, the Classifai is for the end user broadly.

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It enables people like me to do my work quicker. But I’m just wondering if there was something that you were curious about on the AI side which would make your business processes quicker. And again, feel free to not divulge if you don’t wish to.

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[00:41:36] Jake Goldman: I mean the short answer is yes, I think there is. I’m not not divulging anything to say like I’m not sure in a sustainable way what those things are yet. I know what we’re experimenting with. I know what we see some promise in. I kind of take the longer view and feel like it’s not clear yet which of these are sort of novelties in their appeal. Which of these are have enduring power as change forces in our process. It still feels like we’re in a little bit of a, I think, still in the getting to know it phase. I do think there are some things around like more baseline tasks in an estimate, or when we’re building certain kind of projects or certain kind of sites.

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My suspicion is some migration work, some sort of like more fundamental lower level like set up, the v1 of just setting up a basic added functionality. That will go faster, that will be accelerated. But I have to just be honest. I’m still not even confident enough that we’ve done that enough times, tried that enough times, to know whether this is more like when GitHub comes along, becomes popular whether it totally changes the way we work, or it’s just another tool that helps people be more efficient.

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[00:42:39] Nathan Wrigley: My intuitions are that anybody that puts their flag in the sand and says AI will enable this is probably setting themselves up for having to admit that they were wrong. Almost everything that I’ve predicted has not come to pass. Yeah we just have to be, roll with the punches, be flexible I suppose.

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Jake it’s been lovely chatting to you today about all of this. I wonder if you make yourself available elsewhere online. Whether or not you want to divulge a social handle that you use, or a good place where people can contact you. Having listened to this there may be people who wish to do that, and if you wish to spread the word about that please do.

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[00:43:14] Jake Goldman: Here’s a phrase I never thought I would say five years ago. So the place to most get my insight and hear what I’m thinking about business and 10up is LinkedIn. So if you just search for Jake Goldman on LinkedIn I should pop right up, or Jake Goldman in WordPress. That’s probably the best place to go. I mean go to 10up.com and follow our blog. I mean again all of our business activity as a company is there. In terms of like personal posting, not terribly active on any social media at this point.

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[00:43:36] Nathan Wrigley: Well thank you Jake for chatting to me on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.

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[00:43:40] Jake Goldman: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

Jake is the President & Founder of 10up, a digital agency that builds websites and tools for content creators, leveraging open platforms like WordPress.

We start the conversation with an exploration of the recent merger with 10up, Fueled and Insignia. For many years, 10up has been one of the leading Enterprise WordPress agencies. With a roster of well-known clients, Jake has grown the company from himself to hundreds of employees.

Whilst this journey has been exciting and challenging, Jake talks about some areas in which 10up has not been able to compete and how the merger with Fueled will enable them to position themselves for projects which used to be out of reach.

Fueled brings their experience of crafting mobile experiences, and Insignia brings their financial expertise, as well as the industry connections they have built up.

Jake shares how this new venture will continue to leverage WordPress as their CMS of choice; these new partners understand and support 10up’s commitment to contributing to WordPress. There are no plans to immediately alter the structures of either 10up or Fueled, It’s more about building an understanding of the capabilities of each partner, working towards a future in which the company grows into one entity over time.

We talk about the intentional pursuit of potential partners, and Jake reflects on the importance of cultural alignment and connections. He shares how his prior experience has shaped both his personal journey as a leader and the success of 10up, and we explore the milestones, challenges, and key moments that have brought them to where they are today.

Towards the end of the podcast, we pivot to talk about the role of AI in the future of WordPress. It’s clear that AI is coming, and it’s coming rapidly. Any agency working with WordPress would find this topic hard to ignore. But what impact will it really have? Are we expecting entire websites to be built in seconds by just clicking a button? Jake expresses his view that these tools are to be seen as accelerants, complementing human website development rather than replacing it, particularly at the Enterprise level. We delve into 10up’s ongoing exploration and experimentation with AI, discussing some of the tools they have freely released.

If you’re interested in how Enterprise agencies grow, or the future of AI with WordPress, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Automattic has acquired Texts, an all-in-one messaging platform, for $50 million. Texts is a newer company founded in 2020 that creates a centralized inbox for all major messaging platforms, including iMessage, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Signal, Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, and Discord.

The proliferation of messaging apps and inboxes has made responding to communication more complicated than it was in previous years. Most companies would prefer to keep users on their own platforms, but Texts offers a new level of interoperability between messaging apps that doesn’t require the use of its own servers. The website states that users’ messages never touch Texts’ servers. They are encrypted and sent directly to the messaging platforms. Texts charges a monthly subscription, instead of making money by selling users’ data. It also offers a number of AI-powered features for chat summaries, drafts, and translation.

Automattic’s Texts acquisition announcement states that the company is moving “into a fourth market that’s integral to the modern web experience: messaging.”

Mullenweg has been eying the messaging market for years and has previously spoken of his fascination with messaging platforms and their relationship with the independent web. In an interview with Om Malik at WordCamp Europe 2017, he mentioned that Automattic was experimenting with Telegram’s group broadcasting feature. More recently, it 2020, Automattic invested $4.6M in New Vector, a company founded by the creators of Matrix, an open standard that powers decentralized conversations with end-to-end encryption.

Texts’ founder, Kishan Bagaria, will take on a new role as Head of Messaging at Automattic and the rest of the 10-person team was retained to continue working on the product.

In response to an inquiry about the status of the iOS and Android mobile apps for Texts, a representative from Automattic said the company is currently testing an iOS beta with a subset of users. Android support is on the roadmap. The representative also confirmed there are no plans to change pricing right now but Automattic is considering the addition of a freemium plan in the future.

Texts will be expanding its coverage to streamline messages across more platforms. Matrix, Tumblr, and many more integrations are on the roadmap, including Snapchat, Google Messages, and Reddit.

Today is also my 18th anniversary at Automattic! So, an exciting day all around.

Using an all-in-one messaging app is a real game-changer for productivity and keeping up with things. Texts is a paid app, with discounted student pricing, and I think a lot of people will find value in it. It’s quickly become one of the top three apps I spend time using.

This is obviously a tricky area to navigate, as in the past the networks have blocked third-party clients, but I think with the current anti-trust and regulatory environments this is actually something the big networks will appreciate: it maintains the same security as their clients, opens them up in a way consumers will love and is very user-centric, and because we’re committed to supporting all their features it can actually increase engagement and usage of their platforms.

We’re still working out everything for mobile, so if you’re looking for the all-in-one experience on iOS or Android in the meantime, I recommend checking out Beeper. It really is great to have everything together.

If you’re a reverse engineer hacker that is interested in working with a super-small elite team in this space with the fun of a startup and the air cover of Automattic, get in touch with Kishan on Twitter DM or email (kb at texts). Here’s a fun video for Texts. $\"😄\"$

WordPress 6.4 is slated for release on November 7, 2023—two weeks from today. If you haven’t tried it, now is the time.

What’s in WordPress 6.4 RC2?

Thanks to everyone who has tested the beta and RC releases. Since RC1 was released on October 17, there have been more than 25 issues resolved. You can browse the technical details for all recent updates using these links:

Contributing to 6.4

Get involved in testing

Search for vulnerabilities

Update your theme or plugin

Do you build themes and plugins? Your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for users worldwide.

Hopefully, you have already tested your themes and plugins with WordPress 6.4 betas. With RC2, you will want to continue your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.4.

Please post detailed information to the support forums if you find compatibility issues.

Help translate WordPress

A RC2 haiku

Are you a WordPress enthusiast looking for an exciting event to attend? WordCamp Lahore 2023 has just the ticket for you! This official conference, organized by WordPress Lahore, is set to be a fantastic opportunity for WordPress users, developers, and open-source enthusiasts to come together, share knowledge, and contribute to the WordPress community.

Early Bird Tickets:

If you’re eager to attend this dynamic conference, you’re in luck! Early bird tickets are now available for registration at a discounted price. It’s the perfect chance to secure your spot and save some money. Don’t miss out on this fantastic offer & visit this link to avail this discounted price.
https://lahore.wordcamp.org/2023/tickets/

Date and Schedule:

On December 9th, WordCamp Lahore will host a Contributor Day where attendees can receive training on how to contribute to WordPress open-source projects. This is a unique opportunity to learn how to give back to the WordPress community and make a real impact on the world’s most popular content management system.

The formal conference day on December 10th will feature a diverse range of sessions and workshops, all focused on WordPress. Whether you’re a beginner looking to learn the basics or an experienced developer seeking advanced insights, there will be something for everyone.

Sponsorship Opportunities:

WordCamp Lahore is currently seeking sponsors to help make this event a success. Sponsoring a WordCamp is not just an excellent way to support the WordPress community, but it also provides visibility for your brand among an audience passionate about WordPress.https://lahore.wordcamp.org/call-for-sponsors/

Each package offers unique benefits, allowing you to choose the level of support that aligns with your goals and budget. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, you can find more information about the packages and their respective benefits on the WordCamp Lahore 2023 website. Just visit this link: WordCamp Lahore 2023 – Call for Sponsors.

Don’t Miss Out:

WordCamp Lahore 2023 promises to be an exciting and enriching experience for anyone passionate about WordPress and open-source technologies. Early bird tickets are available, and sponsorship opportunities await those who want to make a difference in the WordPress community.

Mark your calendar for December 9th and 10th, and be a part of this thriving WordPress community event in Lahore. Get your tickets, explore the sponsorship options, and get ready for a memorable WordCamp!

For more information and updates, visit the official WordCamp Lahore 2023 website. We look forward to seeing you there!

Matthew Nelson of FirstTracks Marketing and Neil Harner of Inverse Paradox, share their experiences in growth, workflow and team building.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI), a non-profit organization that plays an important role in the open source ecosystem as stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD), has opened its 2024 State of Open Source survey. This is the third year OSI has published the survey in collaboration with OpenLogic by Perforce, who has sponsored it in previous years. The organizations will be joined by the Eclipse Foundation for the 2024 edition.

Both users and contributors to open source software are invited to participate in the survey, but the questions are more geared towards organizations using and building open source software. The survey gathers information on technology trends, how open source is being used, challenges, growth areas, and more. The data will be used in the 2024 State of Open Source Report, which will be freely available on the OpenLogic website in early 2024.

“The data collected in this survey shines a light on the importance of tracking the evolution of Open Source licenses, especially at a time when those licenses are changing from OSI-approved to proprietary,” OSI Executive Director Stefano Maffulli said.

The survey is open through November 10, and takes approximately 7-10 minutes to complete. All responses will be anonymized and the data will be published under an open source license.

The LiteSpeed Cache plugin, used on more than four million WordPress sites, has patched an XSS vulnerability in version 5.7. The plugin provides all-in-one site acceleration capabilities, server-level caching, and a collection of optimization features. It is compatible with WordPress multisite, and popular plugins like WooCommerce, bbPress, and Yoast SEO, which may contribute to its popularity.

Wordfence security researcher István Márton discovered the XSS vulnerability and responsibly disclosed it to the LiteSpeed Cache Team on August 14, 2023. The Wordfence advisory describes how the vulnerability might make it possible for an attacker to inject malicious scripts:

Márton also cautioned that previous versions of WordPress contained a vulnerability that allowed shortcodes supplied by unauthenticated commenters to be rendered in certain configurations. All versions since WordPress 5.9 were subject to this vulnerability and if users aren’t on a patched version of WordPress, the vulnerability would “make it possible for unauthenticated attackers to exploit this Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability on vulnerable installations.”

LiteSpeed Cache patched the vulnerability in version 5.7, released to WordPress.org on October 10. Although the update has been available for two weeks, only 30% of the plugin’s user base is running the latest version.

LiteSpeed Cache users are recommended to update to the latest patched version as soon as possible. Check out the advisory from Wordfence for more details and a full technical analysis.

Testing the plugin, it is a night and day difference between having onboarding for a theme with so many patterns and options, versus getting dropped into a new theme with no direction.

Instead of hunting around for various settings, the plugin helps users get everything set up with just a few clicks. It includes settings for the color palette, brand color, logo, and site icon.

The wizard also enables fast page creation where users can check a box for any of the full-page designs that they want to be created as pages.

One particularly time-saving screen on the onboarding wizard is the one with the homepage settings. Getting the homepage set can be a confusing part of setup for new WordPress users, especially if they don’t know where to look for the setting. Ollie Dash allows a user to select the homepage from a dropdown before they even begin customizing the site.

At the end of the onboarding wizard, users have the option to instantly create and activate a child theme. It’s not necessary for every website, but is a major time saver for those who intend to further customize the theme’s code.

The onboarding includes docs and video resources for getting started, which can be loaded directly inside the wizard without leaving the site.

McAlister said Ollie Dash will be the foundation for more features his team has in development. They are taking the plugin route as an opportunity to add more functionality than would generally be allowed in a WordPress.org-hosted theme.

McAlister said he plans to make the plugin available on WordPress.org in the future. There are currently 1,062 plugins awaiting review in the queue today, with a wait time of 87 days for an initial review. In the meantime, Ollie Dash can be downloaded from the Ollie website and can also be found on GitHub. Users will be notified in the dashboard when there is an update.

Elementor, the most popular website builder plugin for WordPress with more than 5 million active installations, has postponed its upcoming DreamWeb event. The Israel-based company was set to host its first in-person conference on November 2, in Berlin, Germany, but has postponed it due to the circumstances following Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on October 7.

In 2022, Elementor hosted more than 400 meetup events. DreamWeb was set to be a one-day event at the Alte Münze venue with keynotes, knowledge-sharing, activities, networking opportunities, and an evening gala. Early bird tickets went on sale for 99€ in early October.

The event was postponed shortly after the attacks, with a statement on the DreamWeb page:

Many of the company’s employees are based in Israel and have friends and family affected by the ongoing conflict.

“Guided by our values of putting people first, we are diligently taking every measure to ensure the well-being of our employees in Israel, all the while operating to continue our global work with and for Web Creators,” Elementor representatives wrote on the product’s Facebook account on October 15.

“Some of us are hiding with children in shelters as rockets are fired on our cities, and some managed to escape from the Hammas terrorists in the south of Israel to safer places. All of us, unfortunately, know someone who was murdered, or kidnapped.”

The DreamWeb event has been postponed indefinitely, and Elementor stated that “a new date will be announced as peaceful days return.”

As we hit episode 400, Ronald chats with BobWP with a look back and into the next few months with the Do the Woo podcast.

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg will be delivering his annual State of the Word (SOTW) address from Madrid before a live audience on December 11, at 15:00 UTC.

Last year’s event took place in New York City with attendance by invitation only, and 2023 will mark the first year the SOTW will take place from a city outside North America. This change may be a deliberate recognition of the majority (51.4%) of WordPress users who run the software in a non-English language. WordPress adoption has the most potential for growth in emerging markets and locales where Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese languages are spoken.

Traditionally, Mullenweg has used the State of the Word address to make important announcements, share progress, galvanize the contributor base, and recast the vision for WordPress. As the Gutenberg project is now into Phase 3 focusing on collaboration, I would not be surprised to see a demo of functionality that users can expect to see in 2024.

Live attendees will need to reserve a ticket for their seats at the in-person event. A live stream will be available for the vast majority of the WordPress world who will not be able to attend. As in previous SOTW events, anyone will be able to submit questions for the live Q&A portion. The team managing the event plans to release more details in November.

WordPress.org has launched the redesign of the Showcase, with new block-based components, through a collaboration between the Design, Marketing, and Meta teams that began last year. It’s part of a larger effort to modernize WordPress.org and comes two months after the project relaunched a new design for the WordPress.org homepage and Download page.

The updated Showcase allows visitors to browse via categories and tags and offers a significantly improved experience on mobile. It included 101 sites at launch, which can be filtered by five categories: Business, Community, Creative, Publication, and Store, along with nearly half a dozen tags. Visitors can also select from three flavors: WordPress, WordPress Enterprise, and Multisite.

The featured listing at the top of the Showcase randomly updates on refresh. Individual listings in the showcase include screenshots of both desktop and mobile views, along with a brief overview of why the site was included. The background for the screenshots is automatically matched to complement the website’s main colors.

The showcase was designed to inspire visitors and show them what WordPress can do. It contains a diverse representation of some of the best WordPress-powered sites on the web, including the Meta Newsroom, Harvard University, NASA, Rolling Stone, Usain Bolt, The White House, among many other high profile web properties. The showcase also includes some lesser known, beautifully designed sites, featuring art and creativity across a wide range of disciplines, highlighting the endless possibilities and versatility of the WordPress platform.

“This structure allows the site to take advantage of Core functionality like Group and Query blocks as well as custom blocks explicitly built for WordPress.org,” Automattic-sponsored WordPress core contributor Nick Diego said.

“The Showcase also introduces new block-based functionality and several components that will be used elsewhere on the WordPress.org network. Improvements, such as the standardization of layout and spacing variables (#105) and the new Query Filter block (#441), will make it easier to update other areas of WordPress.org to blocks.”

The updated showcase is an invaluable resource for agencies and freelancers who are building sites for clients and need to demonstrate the capabilities of WordPress to scale and serve any industry. It’s also still open for new submissions, which meet the following criteria:

Contributors are working to streamline and automate the submission process, although it will still include a manual review. As this process improves, the showcase will become easier to maintain than it has been in previous years.

It’s time to save the date, December 11, 2023, for this year’s State of the Word!

State of the Word is the annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress project’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg. Every year, the event shares reflections on the project’s progress and aspirations for the future of open source.

For the first time, State of the Word will take place outside North America–this time with the Spanish community in Madrid, Spain. The event will be live-streamed to WordPress enthusiasts around the globe via WordPress.org social media platforms.

Join Matt as he provides a retrospective of 2023, demos the latest in WordPress tech, and comments on the future of the WordPress open source project.

Details including how to reserve a ticket for the in-person event, the link to watch the live stream, and information on how to submit questions for the Q&A portion will be provided in November and shared on WordPress.org and affiliated social media accounts.

Joni Halabi and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss WordPress 6.4, Gutenberg 16.8 and what’s been worked on outside current releases

What’s released

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello and welcome to our 91st episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about WordPress 6.4 a little bit and Gutenberg 16.8, and then we also will talk about what’s already been worked outside the current releases. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress Open Source Project, sponsored by Automattic’s Five for the Future Program. Today, my co-host and special guest is Joni Halabi. She is not a stranger to the Gutenberg Times’ subscribers. She’s a senior developer at Georgetown University and has been building blocks since forever.

Our recent adventure together was the Gutenberg Life Q&A with David Bowman and Alec Geatches, and a fascinating discussion about design systems and how WordPress slowly becomes one. Joni is also the author of a great article on the WordPress developer blog explaining the difference between a static and a dynamic block. A lot of people have read this, so you made an impact there definitely, Joni. It’s my great pleasure to have you on the show tonight, Joni. Welcome. How are you today?

Joni Halabi: I’m doing great, thank you. I’m really excited to be on this show.

Announcements

The first developer notes for 6.4 have been published on the Make blog, and one is for a new extensibility feature for the block editor. That’s about the block box. It’s only for dynamic blocks and it’s only the first iteration, though there are some, but it’s actually the first time that you can, as a developer, automatically insert a block next to another block. You can decide, okay, for every comment block, I want a like button in there. You create the like button block and then you say, “Okay, put it on every comment.” The user will be able to see that in the sidebar, but it will be automatically added, but a user can switch them on and off if they want to. So, that’s definitely for developers to dive in.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, I just wanted to say I am particularly excited about this feature. I just recently saw that this was being added, and it’s probably no secret that I am a very big advocate of dynamic blocks. So, many of the blocks that we’ve created over at Georgetown are dynamic, and I see so many use cases for that. I think it’s going to give our users a lot of flexibility. I think it’s going to give users overall across all WordPress sites, so much flexibility and different options. I can’t wait to see where this is going. I know that this is a first iteration.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It still has some restrictions on there. Right now, it’s only working for template post types, template parts or patterns. So, it’s more usable for theme developers or those who want to change the front end a little bit and add it there. It’s a great feature to add a little shopping cart in the header of a template, shopping cart block. Yeah, there are quite a few other use cases. I could think about the like button going everywhere.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Another use case could be to have a little anchor link on every paragraph, so you can share it everywhere and not have to share the full page, but just the paragraph thing if you want to cite it on a different blog post or something like that. Yeah, it would be helpful. I know a few bloggers actually do that in their self-built blog site.

Joni Halabi: Oh, goodness. Thinking about it, I think you gave some really, really great examples. Yeah, I definitely see a lot for e-commerce usage. Maybe even have a related products block going along that e-commerce theme.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, so check it out. We will have the link in the show note and with all the stuff in there.

Then the editor components updates, that’s a roundup post of all the different changes in the component’s package of the editor. It has nothing to do with the WordPress components, which are totally different. There are 60 of those, but that’s different. So, it talks about the new props for the modal component, making a popup slot available in the sidebar, rewriting tooltip and tab panel to use a better accessibility library for that, improving size consistency, all different.

Those are the few off the top of my head or top of the list of those. Then there is a very nice new feature, it’s called the registerInserterMediaCategory API and Nick Tsekouras published that about a new hook or API. Yeah, depends on what it is, how you would say it. That is that you can add another category in the inserter for the image block.

Joni Halabi: I love categorization. I think this is going to really enable people to better organize their media or organize their images. I don’t know too much about this, but this one looks like a very, very useful one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It definitely comes with an example code that actually adds a new open verse category to it, but it limits the search to exclude some sources. It’s just an example of that when people search in the open source category, open verse category. But other than that, there are some great comments in the example code and check it out.

Then the next one that I wanted to mention is WordPress Core, and both Gutenberg and Core now are using Playwright for all browser-based unit tests. There had been a great effort to rewrite many of the unit tests to Playwright and downsize the Puppeteer exposure of the code base.

It’s not done yet, but it’s definitely progressing very fast. Playwright just has a few advantages over Puppeteer, and most of them have to do with the browser testing. So, visual regression testing is a little bit more stable for both the Core and the Gutenberg.

Joni Halabi: The article on this, if anybody is interested, there’s a link to Playwright documentation. There is a link to migrating tests, so that’s definitely something that’s worth checking out. If you’re in that business of writing automated tests, then it looks like it’s going to be much more stable now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, but we still will see some flaky tests coming through the issue tracker, but I think it’s one of the oddities of the Gutenberg repo that you see flaky tests coming up and then they’re gone again because it has run through it.

Then there’s also a new admin notice function in WordPress 6.0 and Colin Stewart wrote the death note for it with new functions get admin notice and then the parameters for it and the filters and the actions and example code for that and also how to create a collection of notices so they can be output at once.

I’m not sure it’ll offset what many people see in the WordPress Admin. Right now, that is a page long admin notices for something, if that offsets that, but I think a lot of people were working on it for several years. So, I think that is really cool that it’s coming in now. Right now, I think it’s not mandatory to use.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, I think it’s going to make it easier for plugin authors to create admin notices. So, for example, if your plugin is introducing a breaking change or if your plugin requires a database update, things like that, I see a lot of those notices come across.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, no, it’s definitely raising the whole field for plugin extenders. So, this and many, many more. There are many more dev note, not many, but I would say six or seven additionally being worked on for the field guide of the release.

WordPress 6.4

Just an update on WordPress 6.4, October 17th is the day of release candidate one and that’s also the deadline for the field guide. We all know if it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done. So, also, the death notes will come in at the last minute tomorrow to get into the field guide.

People, if you haven’t tested your theme plugin or sites with a new release, now is the time. The final release is only three weeks away, and that’s only three weeks to fix things if something doesn’t work right. Not every plugin or theme developer is that. Best ones are of course updating their plugins and the themes ahead of time, but you definitely need to make sure.

Joni Halabi: Yes, super, super important. Use that beta test or plugin and test, test, test.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Test, test, test. I wanted to give a shout-out to a plugin called Site Health and Troubleshooting, because that plugin has saved my bacon many, many times when I was working with clients for our agency. It comes from Core developers and is a switch. Remember when you want to troubleshoot something and support says, “Did you disable all plugins and themes?” Yeah, how do you do that on a live site? It’s really hard and this plugin to the rescue, because you can as an admin switch off all plugins and themes at once without affecting the front end of your website. It’s really the best plugin testing tool ever. You get all the information from the Site Health features, and then you can enable each theme or plugin one at a time without affecting the front page. You see where the error comes in.

Within minutes, most of the time, you figure out which plugin is the culprit and then get connected with the plugin support of that plugin and to make it. So, Site Health and Troubleshooting, the troubleshooting part isn’t a plugin. Site Health is built into WordPress. So, if you run into trouble, especially site owners that have no technical knowledge whatsoever, it’s really hard to disable all the plugins without offsetting this live site. Who does that? But yeah, I did for a while.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, and not everybody is lucky enough to have a staging site, for example. I had never heard of this plugin, but I’m writing that down. I’m going to check that out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Of course, there will be a link in the show notes for everyone to check it out and have a better life with updating any plugins as well as themes. Yeah, so that’s my spiel around 6.4. It was a short release cycle. There were only five Gutenberg plugin releases between 6.3 and 6.4. So, that’s only half of what other major WordPress releases had before. So, 6.2 had 10 and 6.3 had 10 too, 6.4 is only five. But also, we have very early in the year and I think over all the times when we do major plugin releases during Christmastime or holiday time. So, thank God for that, but that’s why there’s also not so many new features in the version.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it did feel fairly light. I was surprised it was coming so quickly. But yeah, no, it has been about that time.

What’s Released – Gutenberg 16.8

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Otherwise, if you do five more Gutenberg cycles, 16.8 was released at October 11. So, you would go right into the holiday time with your release, especially with the major part of the release, which is getting everything ready for beta and then getting every documentation death note written for release candidate one. So, I think this is a better way on clearing out the year, which brings us to what’s released in Gutenberg. Gutenberg 16.8 came out. Vicente Canales released it on October 11. There’s also a minor release, 16.8.1 available now, and it mainly contains its fixes and improvements that were necessary after WordPress 6.4 beta testing.

Out of the 160 PRs, still a big release. 49 were backport to the WordPress 6.4 beta releases. So, there are definitely additional bug fixes in that release. Of course, we have the show notes for the release post that Vicente published, but we go through the show notes. There is one new feature that I wanted to point out, and that is that when you edit pages in the site editor, it now has a template toggle to show the template. The site editors in 6.3 is now also the place where you can edit your content on pages or edit the page template and now you have a toggle in that. So, it’s easier and accessible. But yeah, I saw some of the feedback coming back from the call for testing that Anne McCarthy did with the site editor.

There’s still some really confusion in, “When are we editing content and when are we adding template?” There’s still something that confuses people, including people who do content editing every day and still get confused. Where am I now and what am I doing? So there’s still something to be had about that.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, I can see that. There are a lot of things that we call editors within the scope of WordPress. So, I mean, there’s the editor, the site editor, the post editor. Editor is a loaded word. I think it’s really going to come down to the UI of all of these editing structures that we have.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Then you have the person editor, the editor with the capabilities of editing stuff. So, we use the same word for a lot of things. It’s confusing and you always need to figure out the context in which you are talking about, but I saw in Gutenberg, there is actually the effort to streamline the post editor with the site editor and the widget editor and all that, the navigation editor. They’re all coming into the same iframe and have now almost all the same features with a sidebar, with a list view. So, I think that the efforts are really good to streamline those interfaces.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, for sure. There’s so much going on right now and I’m really looking forward to that effort being completed because then I think that’s the point where we’re going to get to true full site editing where everything is just on the same screen.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. I’m never sure if we will ever get to the completion part. Well, this is a web. Yeah, you need to let it go. Yeah. There is no perfect though. There is no complete. It’s all in flux. Yeah.

Joni Halabi: So the next, there are a number of updates in the block library, and the first one that I’d like to call out is one about the footnotes. So, the footnotes now using the Core’s meta revisioning, if it’s available, which footnotes in general is a very, very interesting new feature that I really want to start diving into. But yeah, this one is specifically in terms of making sure that those revisions stay in line with what’s going on with Core.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The new feature, you’re thinking about footnotes or you’re thinking about meta revisions?

Joni Halabi: I’m very hard focused, but yeah, no, footnotes. I think footnotes are going to be really great, especially in terms of the blogging aspects of people’s sites. I have makeshift footnotes in the posts on my own site, so streamlining the ability to create footnotes like this is….

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Especially with academic settings. Yeah, academic settings, yeah. It’s really important. Also, when you’re citing other third sources, you cannot always link from the… I think it’s easier to put it in footnotes for the reader than getting bogged down and following the link and missing the rest of the post when you link-

Joni Halabi: Yeah, that and annotations too. I tend to write and I also want to annotate my work. I don’t want to necessarily lead my reader down the same rabbit hole that I am in when I’m writing the post, but if they want more information, yes, please go down to the footnotes. Take a look at this rabbit hole that I have created and then please go back to my main points.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, but footnotes are stored in post meta, but there has never been a revision feature for post metadata and that’s why it’s that particular PR phrased that way. So, it uses the meta revision once available if it’s available, and there is a track ticket that the meta revisions actually are coming into 6.4. So, it’s what comes first kind of thing, but they figured it out in that. Yeah. So, the next part I wanted to point out is adding design tools to as many blocks as possible is on the way. The login, logout block now has spacing support, which is really helpful. So, you don’t have to use the spacer anymore. You can just do it through the block as well, block sidebar.

Joni Halabi: Yup, and then the next one is being able to set a custom color when applying an initial background image. So, I love anything that lets somebody set a custom color, because then you can really control the accessibility of that background color in case your image fails for whatever reason. You can default to that custom color and it maintains the accessibility of the page. So, if your text is white and you have a dark background image, for example, then for whatever reason you’re on a poor connection, for whatever reason, the image doesn’t load, you’re not stuck with a page that’s showing white text on top of a white background because nobody can read that. Being able to set that custom color to be that fallback for the image that hopefully loads but might not.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think one of the features here is also that it’s actually automatically detecting the background of the image that you load and setting it automatically, so you don’t have to think about it, because I wouldn’t think about that accessibility piece unless somebody points it out to me. Oh yeah, you’re right. Yeah, I should have set a custom color, but doing it automatically I think is one of those great features that you don’t have to think about and it really supports accessibility without making a fuss about it.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, absolutely. Especially if it’s right on that cusp where if you are a fully cited user, you might be able to read that text and you might not realize, “Oh wait, this red text on a blue background, I can read it, but maybe somebody else can’t.” Yeah, I love automation like that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, the next thing is default suggested links to pages. So, that’s in context of external links. So, that’s a very interesting diagram in the PR that makes me think, “Is that too complicated or is that very easy?” It’s mainly for the navigation block. When you have a third party link, it suggests that. What does it do?

Joni Halabi: So what my takeaway from this was that I actually had a really hard time reading this diagram that’s in here, because there is a lot going on, but it seems like the suggestions that were originally coming up in the navigation lock were just everything, post pages, what have you. It seems that they are limiting that to only pages, instead of posts, which I think narrows the scope. I like this narrowing of the scope, because when you’re creating a navigation block, you’re more likely to want to link to a more evergreen page than to a post that might be fresh now, but might be out of date in six months or a year or what have you. That’s not necessarily something you want in your navigation. So, narrowing that scope I think makes it a little bit easier to find links.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, thank you so much for jumping in there. I was drawing a blank. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The navigation in terms of posts, you probably would link more to category pages where a list of posts on a certain topic are there. The narrowing down of the scope is really helpful for the user there. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The next one I’m really happy about because now I get a confirmation when I move a post to trash.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I was going through the developer notes and somehow I had a post published that was previously by accident deleted, came back from trash, and then had trashed in the permanent link. So, it was really, “What?” So I needed to just delete the permanent link and then it would automatically create a normal link, but it was kind of, “Huh? Why would that be?” So having a confirmation yes or no, do you really want to trash it, because it had so many ramifications to rectify that situation again. Yes, it was really hard.

Joni Halabi: So the next one is it’s titled add template replace flow to template inspector. What it really boils down to is it looks like there is a change to just the way that you replace a template when you’re editing a page. When I was diving a little bit deeper into this, I feel like this is maybe a first pass or that there are some more passes of this to come, because I did see some comments that the UI could be streamlined a little bit more than it is, but there’s a great video that demonstrates this, where you are on the page editor.

You can go and replace a template and then it brings you to this modal where you can choose whatever template that you want. It gives you a bunch of selections. You can choose one and your page just updates to that new template and then you can just go about your day. I recommend checking that out. It might be something, especially if you’re heavily using templates, something to keep an eye on for future updates as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So before it was just a dropdown box in the site bar for the pages, and now it opens up a modal. So, you actually can preview the template that you would associate it with a page if you want to change it. So, I think that’s a really good way to think about templates that “Oh, I can reorganize the content on this page by just changing another template.” I get a preview on how that’s going to look because we are all about avoiding that piece where we say safe and pray. I think Helen Hou-Sandi uses it a lot. That’s the previous way to do editing, is you do something and then you need to look at frontend how it looks, and the block editor is all about what you see is what you get.

Joni Halabi: Before I heavily relied on preview, which some of the previous updates to the previous functionality I was very thankful for.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah. Then the next one were updates in the block library. The search block got some enhancements and one is to allow the space for the input field only when the form expands and not when it’s collapsed. That was always a little bit hard to place. Then the alignment and the icon button got a little correction on the width, so it looks a little bit more streamlined. The search block is an odd block. I really liked it, but it’s always a little harder for me to add it to a navigation block definitely. But even if you want to have it standalone on top of your blog post or something like that on a template, it’s always a little bit harder to organize, I think.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, I can see that. So, the next changeup is in the site editor, and it’s something regarding the template parts. So, basically, we are no longer displaying the navigation section in the template parts details when the menu is missing, which sounds very obvious. If there’s no navigation menu, don’t display it. So, there’s some great screenshots that illustrate this in the GitHub issue. Very, very straightforward in those details. If there’s no navigation menu, you just don’t see the navigation in the details for that template part.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: These are the quality of life issues or things that you don’t know unless you read the changelog. Oh, we needed to change that. Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The next one that I want to point out was for the font library, unfortunately, it’s not going to be in 6.4, but the management screens got a new tab and that is for the font uploads. So, if you as a user want to add additional fonts to your site, you can upload that. That was before, but now you have a separate tab for it. Before it was you needed to scroll all the way down past all the fonts and go to the upload section. Now it’s just one tab. So, it’s much easier to find. Unfortunately, for many, many people, we won’t have it in 6.4. It definitely needed more time to get finished, especially in the rest API endpoints and then have more testing going on, because I think it was only in 16.7 that it actually was merged into Gutenberg.

They tried for two beta sessions to get it actually to a place where users can really use it. There were always something. So, the release team said, “Well, I think that’s a sign that we need to have it simmer for more moments, for a few more rounds in the Gutenberg plugin and have some more testing being done because it’s not ready yet.” Yeah.

Joni Halabi: That makes sense. I’m looking forward to it for the next version of Core, but that sounds like a really nice update. The next update affects the list views. So, there were some performance issues when a user or a content editor rather would come in and select all the blocks on the page, and there is now a fix for that. So, this affects pages that have just a lot, a lot of blocks. So, the example in the testing instructions says, “Add 150 or more paragraphs,” for example. So, before when a content editor would go in, open list view, do a command + A or control + A to select all of the blocks on the page and there are a couple hundred blocks, the editor would just freeze. It would just freeze up on you because that’s a lot of information.

So, this particular PR that solves that performance issue. So, they’re noting that there will be a slight delay for rendering items, but there shouldn’t be any huge, huge slowdowns to the point where it makes you think that your site is broken.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. No, that’s for the power users. It’s not uncommon to have a weakened edition with many, many things and then have a couple hundred blocks in there, because we have a separator block or a spacer block or something like that. Power users really don’t want their site to be broken especially, or losing content, especially with those large posts. The next one is the image block. With the 6.4 version, the image block becomes a light box feature with it. But this Gutenberg plugin PR that I point out now fixes actually that the duo tone has not been applied to the image in the light box.

So, you had maybe a gray filter on the duo tone filter on your image, and then people clicked on it, and then on the front end, it still has the image original colors and not the duo tone. There is a reason why there’s duo tone on an image. That was definitely a bug and it was fixed, but it was so visual that I thought we definitely want to talk about that when people tested it before. Yeah.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, for sure. Next up is an accessibility fix to what might be my favorite new block or favorite new feature, footnotes. They have added aria labels to the return links. On the footnotes, when you go down, you click on a footnote, you go down to the bottom of the page, you read your footnote. There is a little link at the end of that footnote that will take you back to the main content of the page where you picked up your footnote. Now, there is an aria label, which is great for accessibility. It will tell screen reader users, “Hey, this is where I’m going back to.” Very small but impactful change for people.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. You don’t want to lose your place in the post just because you’re following a footnote and not going back to where it was. Yeah, same for the table of content block. There have been quite a few accessibility improvements. Them missing was actually part of the reason why the table of content block that’s in the plugin actually did not make it into WordPress 6.4 because it was not complete from how you access it. Even for the abled people, it was really hard to use the table of content, because it didn’t have a whole lot of styling options. With additional accessibility of movements, now it can be tested more and in a broader reach as well.

Joni Halabi: I would throw this under accessibility as well. There is a small fix to the patterns, where for a block pattern that is not synced, the terminology that was being used for that was they were using standard. So, this change replaces that use of the word standard, to use not synced instead for block patterns that are not synced. I think that makes it more obvious, because standards can be… What is standard? Some people might have questions, but it just brings a level of clarity to what’s going on there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, especially in patterns, because right now, we only have two, but we will have a third type of pattern and that will be partially synced. So, a standard, what is that? So that it really brings it home. Yeah, thank you for pointing that out as well. I think I skipped over one of the documentation items that I wanted to point out for our listeners who are looking a little bit further beyond the WordPress Gutenberg usage. Oh, that’s the real-time collaboration experiment is now switched. You can switch that on in 16.8, and there’s also a document now available in the block editor handbook about the current state of the real-time collaboration experiment. So, you can follow along on what’s going to be next year for the Gutenberg editor.

There have been a lot of documentation changes, don’t get us wrong, but they’re mostly removing redundant stuff like remove the full site editing documentation because it will be in the themes handbook. Rename block hooks to block filters, because now block hooks are a different feature. So, it’s all a little bit, but the team is really working very hard to get the documentation up to par with 6.4 as well. Yeah, I think that was the changelog for 16.8, the Gutenberg plugin version. Thank you so much for going through that with me.

What’s in Active Deveopment or Discussed

We are now at the section what’s in active development or what’s in discussed. I would say with WordPress 6.4 almost out the door, Gutenberg developers are shifting gears now and also working on some new things.

Those need your input opinion, design use, and I share with you in the show notes four links. The first one would be a media library proof of concept in the site editor. The contributor has done some really experiment with that on how to add images right through your media library there, have a list view there. Now, list view, not from the editor but from a list of media and how you can navigate that and how you can preview that and all that. So, that’s really a first version of it. Take a look. It’s not yet merged. The PR itself has been closed. I just see that, but there is a replacement of that, right?

Joni Halabi: Yeah. That PR in particular is labeled as purely an experiment, but at the top of that PR, there is a great video that demonstrates this proof of concept, which I personally really like it. I think it’s far more intuitive. It only shows the list view. There is also a grid view that if you dive a little bit more into the PR, you can see some screenshots of the grid view as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The developer now that his experiments, he went through them, he now opened a tracking issue on GitHub called Collaboration Media Library. I’m sure there will be quite a few discussion threads going on there. The whole feature is now divided up into certain tasks and defines a little bit more than scope and all that. So, you can read up more about what the developers are thinking right now.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, this is exciting. It’s nice to see the media library getting a little bit of love here.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it definitely needs a lot of love. Yes, I have seen tickets or track tickets that are 18 years old and you say, “Okay, yeah, I wonder if we ever get categories for our media libraries or better views or bulk updates, all kinds of things.” So if you look at the track tickets that are concerned in the media library, there are quite a few that could use some love.

All right. The second link of what active development or discussed is introduce an experimental form and input blocks to allow building basic forms. So, the ecosystem of WordPress has a huge amount of plugins that help you with creating forms. Forms are very, very important. A lot of interactivity is built on top of forms and there has been a 15-year history of what forms need to be or could be.

Ari did an experiment to figure out, “Okay, if we had a standard on how blocks are built for forms, maybe the plugins can build on top of the standards.” Then when you switch out the plugin for forms, it wouldn’t destroy all your forms and you had to recreate them. Of course, some of the plugins have imports of other plugins forms, but that’s just good common sense because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to sell to existing customers or those who have existing forms. That is definitely something that’s merged in Gutenberg already.

It’s an experiment, so when you activate Gutenberg in your website, you could scroll down to the menu Gutenberg and then there is a section there called experiments. There you can switch on the experiment you are interested in. So, this one actually also deals with block bindings, data bindings, and that kind of thing. So, it’s going to be really interesting to see what you think when you use it.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, this is an exciting one because I can see in the future people creating block patterns for just really common use cases. So, the demo video shows like a send a message pattern, but I see patterns all over the internet for subscribe to my newsletter, get on my mailing list, things like that. Forms are so common on sites in general. I’m excited about this one too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, all really good too. There are even some plugins that actually provide input blocks already, but also, it narrows down the openness again when you have to have a separate plugin for your forms and then what happens afterwards when you don’t use the plugin anymore.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s really good. Then the third one is for the insiders of using React quite a bit is that the default JSX import is done through React rather than the WordPress elements package. So, it automatically updates when React updates and the front page of WordPress elements package is actually a wraparound the React package. So, taking it out, taking the JSX feature out of that makes it more streamlined with React.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, for sure. Just for clarity, for block creators, this should not affect your code at all. This is really just how JSX is getting pulled in. So, if you’re using JSX, you should not need to change anything. This is really a very backend change.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and the WordPress elements package will still be around because it’s already in Core and there is this backwards compatibility promise as well. Yeah, yeah. So, thank you for pointing it out. There’s always this fear. Are there breaking changes? Yeah.

Joni Halabi: That was my first thought when I read that one actually. That’s why I wanted to point it out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, thank you. So, good to have you on the show, Joni. You pointed out quite a few things that I didn’t think about. So, yeah.

So, the last one on the section what’s active or what’s discussed is that the Gutenberg has now new labels for the data views. Normally, I wouldn’t point out new labels at the Gutenberg repo that come and go. I think we have about 400 or so labels there. So, yeah, I wouldn’t do it on the podcast. But with the new admin changes that are coming with the Gutenberg phase number three, many people want to be on the forefront or want to keep track of what’s happening. Do I have to change things or can I influence how it’s going and stay on top of it? This new label was created to label for the data views work.

So, every time there is a custom post type list or a media list in various things, so that in the WP Admin, like your post list, it’ll all be reimagined in the site editor paradigm kind of thing. The label tracks the high level work for that. So, you can really follow along with that and even subscribe to that without getting the fire hose of the rest of the Gutenberg repo that has a lot of issues and PRs every week.

I think we are at the end of our show today, and I ask every special guest in that section now. So, Joni, if there’s anything that you want to announce or you want to point out that you didn’t get a chance to talk about because you didn’t get a chance, now is your chance.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: How can people reach you? What are you working on? Is there something exciting in your life that you released?

Joni Halabi: Nothing coming just yet. I did a talk a little while ago at WordPress Accessibility Day that I think the recordings are coming out. I don’t know if they’re already out, but I will announce it on my socials. I am @JoniHalabi almost everywhere, and you can also find me… I infrequently blog at my website, which is jhalabi.com.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, yeah, thank you for pointing out the WordPress Accessibility Day. So, what did you present about, what’s your talk about?

Joni Halabi: It was actually a plugin that I initially created a while ago. I call it Besan Block, but it is essentially a way to create accessible SVG bar charts on your website and it integrates with Google Sheets. So, you can automatically import your content from a Google sheet and it will create a bar chart. It’s accessible and tabable and readable by screen readers. So, I walked folks through how to do that. The primary focus of that particular talk was the creation of the accessible SVG.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah, so I’m definitely going to mention that in the show notes as well. Is that plugin available in the repo or is it on GitHub?

Joni Halabi: It is. It’s available in GitHub, but it is also in the WordPress plugin directory. It is called Besan Block, B-E-S-A-N.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: B-E-S-A-N. Okay. I’ll find it. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you for being on the show. As always, the show notes, dear listeners, will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is episode 91. If you have any questions or suggestions or news that you want us to include the next time, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s an email address and it’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. So, thank you so much, Joni, for joining us today. Thank you all of the listeners for listening. If you want, it would be really, really helpful if you would do a review on your favorite podcast app.

We haven’t had any reviews because we didn’t ask for it, but it always helps with the distribution of the changelog. Absolutely, you will get it read on the next episode. So, there’s a little shout-out if it’s a good review of course. Maybe if it’s a mediocre review. All right. So, that’s it. Thank you for listening. Goodbye, and I’ll talk to you in probably four weeks. Thank you so much.

In this Woo AgencyChat Julia Eden and Matt Woodman from Atomic Smash talk about evolving services, accessibility, UX/UI design and more.

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